The aim of this chapter is to review guidelines, standards and style guides in the area of HCI with examples, tables and pointers to further information. We first define each of the areas and then summarise the advantages and disadvantages of each. Each section contains call outs and sideboxes to tailor the information for the different types of audience, for example:
The introduction will be about 6 pages in length.
The purpose of the introduction is to provide some historical context for the area and to highlight the reasons that guidelines, standards and style guides evolved in HCI.
The guidelines section will be about 12 pages in length.
We will begin with a summary description of the many sources of HCI guidelines, such as Human Engineering Military Guidelines; Smith & Mosier's Guidelines for Designing User Interface Software; Shneiderman's user interface guidelines; Nielsen's usability heuristics; and the various flavours of user interface checklist that exist. We will then provide a summary table listing the main guidelines and identifying commonalties. We will use this table to synthesise the existing guidelines into a useful, practical set of HCI guidelines.
This section will also provide a detailed, step-by-step guide showing how to use guidelines to review a user interface.
We will end the section with a discussion of the strengths and limitations of guidelines. For example, the drive to make guidelines simple and generic means that sometimes they are not precise enough to be of practical use. This leads into our next section on HCI standards.
The standards section will be about 14 pages in length (it will be slightly longer than the other sections because of the number of tables).
The purpose of this section will be to review product and process standards in HCI. We will cover National, European and International standards in HCI, as well as de facto, proprietary and industry standards. We will review the process of developing a standard and define the various standards bodies and the acronyms and abbreviations that they use.
This section will also provide a detailed, step-by-step guide showing how to use standards to review a user interface. This will include some user interface checklists based on the ISO 9241 series of standards. This will be the first time these checklists have been published and will provide a useful source for anyone who needs to check compliance of their product with this influential standard.
The review will culminate in a table that the practitioner can use to identify standards relevant to a particular product, platform or need. For example, the table will help answer questions such as "What HCI standards are relevant to a Windows-based product using voice input" and "What HCI standards do I need to consult to help me design a handheld, wireless-based pen-input device?"
The style guide section will be about 12 pages in length.
This section will review the various flavours of style guide such as platform style guides (e.g. Macintosh, Windows and OSF/Motif), in-house style guides and application style guides. This section will describe how to write, implement, police and maintain a style guide, along with "tips from the trenches" on how to encourage developers to accept and use it.
The various threads will be brought together with a specific case study based on our work with the European Patent Office. We were commissioned by the European Patent Office to help them develop and implement a wide ranging ergonomics program over a two-year period. The program was based on guidelines derived from the EC Directive on Display Screen Work. The guidelines are a high-level policy statement agreed by the President and the General Advisory Council and the technical content is contained in a series of working documents. Three of these are concerned with HCI issues. Two of the working documents (concerning usability specification and testing and user involvement techniques) form part of the Project Managers Handbook, a formal statement of procedures for major automation projects. The third working document is a user interface style guide for future systems developed under IBM CUA/Presentation Manager for OS/2 v2.x.
In the summary we will identify a core limitation of all these approaches: namely that none of them guarantee a usable interface. We will highlight the missing element as a user centred design process and point to the recent ISO 13407 standard to show how the HCI and standards community is addressing this issue.