Corporate So

Style Guides

Background

Style Guides embody a specific set of design guidelines and exemplars, based on knowledge of a business’ strategic objectives, specific operations, IT strategy and user population. This knowledge is applied to the user interface design process to guide decisions and promote usability and consistency within and across developments.

Our Approach

Corporate Solutions’ user centred design method, STUDIO, offers a set of principles which should be considered during the design of Style Guides.  Although principles must always be balanced against findings from user centred design analysis and evaluation, Corporate Solutions’ ensure that Style Guides embody the following STUDIO principles: -

	Always strive for usability;
	Strive for consistency;
	Group actions logically;
	Reduce both short term and working memory requirements;
	All actions should be reversible;
	Errors should be designed out;
	Provide information, not data;
	Use the language of the user;
	Provide feedback at all times;
	Modes should be avoided, operations should have the same effect wherever they are invoked;
	Support Contexts.

Our Experience

Corporate Solutions have produced style guides for organisations in a number of major industry sectors, including the production of the most comprehensive UK style guide: interface standards for the National Strategy for Police Information Systems (NSPIS).  Corporate Solutions have also had articles published relating to the use of style guides in an organisational setting.

For more information, please contact us.