Supporting the use of guidelines and style guides in professional user interface design

Abstract

The use of user-interface design knowledge such as general guidelines and environment-specific style guides can be valuable, and is increasingly required in professional user-interface design. However, conventional guidelines and style guides ( gl and sg) in the form of documents are consistently found hard to use. We have earlier demonstrated knowledge-based critiquing to be a technically feasible way of delivering relevant gl and sg knowledge. The purpose of this study was to investigate the need and acceptability of such techniques for professional user-interface designers. An experiment was carried out where four professional designers developed user-interface prototypes to a functional specification. The designs were evaluated using our gl and sg-based critiquing system, which identified a total of 17 deviations from style-guide requirements or design recommendations. Interviews were conducted with the designers to find the reasons for the deviations and to identify important requirements for a critiquing design-support tool. The deviation analysis points to an existing need for better ways of accessing gl and sg knowledge. The interviews indicate that the designers would find a critiquing tool valuable, provided that it leaves them in control of their work and indicates the severity of the detected deviations.