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Managing the use of style guides in an organisational setting: practical lessons in ensuring UI consistency

Nichole Simpson, Executive Consultant, Corporate Solutions

This paper explores the use of Corporate Style Guides as a mechanism for managing consistency at the user interface.

The software design community is becoming increasingly aware of the value of Style Guides in promoting consistency and usability in designs. Style Guides form a valuable reference point and management tool, and can offer particular advantage in cases where distributed or out-sourced design and development groups exist. Style Guides also fill a gap in the development process, providing advice more specific than the guidance contained in published standards, and more general than the design specifications of a single system. They provide opportunities for the improvement of group design activities and overcoming the limitations of an individualistic approach.

Style Guides can be shown to deliver tangible financial benefits to organisations through the promotion of consistency of design. However, it is recognised that the process of managing the use of Style Guides is not well defined. This paper draws on lessons learned from a range of projects concerned with providing Style Guides and Style Guide management processes in commercial and industrial settings.

Reproduced with the kind permission of Elsevier Science
For the full paper, see 'Interacting with Computers, Volume 11, Number 3, March 1999, pp 323-351'.

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