The use of guidelines in interface design

We studied the use of an evolving interface style book to evaluate the role of such guidelines in the development of style-conforming interface designs. Although the designs were judged to be generality conforming, study participants had significant difficulty in interpreting the guidelines. Our designers were manifestly task oriented and impatient with extraneous material. They depended heavily on the pictorial examples, often to the exclusion of the accompanying text. We conelude that dependency on guidelines should be minimized, and that guidelines should be developed primarily to complement toolkits and interactive examples, focussing on information intrinsically unavailable through those vehicles. ©1991 ACM.