Slashdot Mirror
A Good Style Guide Under the Creative Commons?
eldavojohn writes "I've been charged with making a specific user interface style guide for a suite of software by my employer. I'm not quite sure where to start. So I turned to my favorite search engine only to be brutally disappointed with what is out there to help me. I'm a software developer but have not had any formal training in UI design or look and feel. I'm looking for something more than just "keep it simple, stupid." I'm looking more for something that is specific but not technologically dependent. This doesn't have to be a global standard, merely a document that illustrates how one would effectively describe look and feel. Does anyone know of such a guide either created by an organization, government or company for their own uses — possibly one even released under the creative common license?" In addition to just documentation, what other UI advice can Slashdot readers offer in order to ensure quality development?
Macintosh develop site has several well put together style guides for software development that you should look at. Check out the Apple Human Interface Guidelines. Apple may not be your cup of tea but they always have good ideas and have a well put together interface and this will DEFINITELY give you a good idea where and how to start.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
GNOME HIG
http://library.gnome.org/devel/hig-book/stable/
Apple's HIG
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/OSXHIGuidelines/XHIGIntro/chapter_1_section_1.html
Then form a review committee and start issuing minutes.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
Know the author Ed Tufte.
Know what HCI stands for.
Know your audience and let them evaluate Throwaway Prototypes.
If you are looking for a book to teach you UI design, you are misguided. If you are looking for a Creative Commons and/or Open approach to UI design, register a domain called "Principles of UI Design" and launch a Wiki on it, then license it with the license you desire (but I would recommend CC0).
If all goes well, this thread will serve as a good starting point for getting ideas/content to populate your new Wiki with.
Support the 30 Hour Work Week!!!
Pretty much every platform (in this case, I'd count GNOME and KDE as 'platforms') will have a set of Human Interface Guidelines that will give advice on how to craft a usable interface that meshes well with native applications and provides a solid user experience. There's no one hard-and-fast style guide, though there are lots of examples of what NOT to do if you Google (see the User Interface Wall of Shame for one).
I've been charged with making a specific user interface style guide for a suite of software by my employer. I'm not quite sure where to start
You don't know where to start because you don't work as a tech writer!
Tell your tightwad boss to pick someone more suited to the task - Even the weenies in Marketing can probably do the task better than an engineer (unless you just happen to have a background in technical writing, but it sounds like that doesn't fit into your job description/requirements).
Geeks can do anything - That doesn't always make us the best person for every job even tangentially related to "computers". If you want me to design a website, I can make it do anything HTML supports, but prepare for a color scheme that makes most people's eyes bleed...
Some of the best input you can get is by giving the software to someone completely unfamiliar to the project, and ask them to accomplish 6 objectives that require them to navigate the application's interface. Ideally, you'll want them to be able to successfully complete those objectives with a minimal amount of time and hassle searching for the proper way to accomplish it. Have them identify trouble spots they ran into (icons confusing, unclear menu structure, etc). After reading over the input of uninitiated testers, you can fine tune your interface to be more intuitive.
I suffer from the problem when coding that I put menus and icons in places where *I* know where to find them, and that make sense to me. The problem is, I know the code from the ground up, so I know exactly what I'm doing - a huge bias compared to a new user who is trying the application for the first time.
Essentially, if your computer illiterate mother can figure your menu structure out, you are golden. A lofty goal that you'll probably have to cut some compromises into, but essentially the point is to keep it simple and make sure you account for your target audience.
"I'm a software developer but have not had any formal training in UI design or look and feel."
That would make you the perfect Microsoft employee.
I would suggest going out an getting a book on Interaction Design, such as that by Sharp, Rogers, and Preece. If you look over the diagrams and the chapters you should get the gist of it. This book is used in introductory graduate Human-Computer Interaction courses.
A Great Brochure from Humanfactors.org is here:
http://www.humanfactors.com/downloads/guistandards.pdf
Page very close attention to page 14. It describes your situation as "Pitfall #4." And it's right.
Ed R.Zahurak
You know, oblivion keeps looking better every day.
Choose a curly brace style and stick with it! Oh, this is UI styling we're talking about...
Try this HCI web comic, I don't think it is updated anymore but there's lots of great archives:
http://www.ok-cancel.com/
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
Unless the software suite is the only thing the user is going to see, and not the underlying OS or any other software, you should just follow the guidelines for the OS or desktop environment. Otherwise, you get a schizophrenic result that clashes with everything else, leading to user confusion and frustration. If you're designing from scratch, I suggest reading Raskin's "The Humane Interface," and using that as a baseline. Don't read the Apple user guidelines. Unless you're used to a Mac, they don't make sense.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
Signed,
Chester W. Lampworth
President and CEO
Amalgamated Manure, Inc.
I almost never post on /. but seeing this I can NOT pass up.
Creating a good interface is about FAR more than just pretty pictures. An artist might make it look good, but looking good and being functional are not related in any way, shape or form. I've seen art houses produce UIs that were illogical and violated many basic UI principles but look nice. The worst part is your client will fall in love with the looks without thinking about the damage that is being done.
If you are going to bring in outside sources, there are art houses that have specific UI design experience. You should make sure you engage one of these. Or come up with a design, then have the art house make it look nice.
Real UI design is about user cases, apprentice-master relationships, and other things 99.9% of artists don't know anything about.
... and ignore everything that they do.
Then work with real users and find out what they want the app to do, how they want it to do it, and assess what their knowledge and skills levels are. In all likelihood you are entirely the wrong person to judge what's appropriate for end users.
Three Squirrels
I strongly recommend this link: http://www.welie.com/
This is a collection of design patterns for creating UI.
I was extremely impressed by this work already 8 years ago when it was presented in PLoP2K http://jerry.cs.uiuc.edu/~plop/plop2k/proceedings/proceedings.html but since then it became much much bigger.
This is not directly a style guide, but a Federal (US) usability guide. http://usability.gov/pdfs/guidelines_book.pdf
Hopefully this helps.
I dunno, it took over 7million years and the second greatest computer of all time to come up with that answer.
Doesn't seem overly simple to me.
quack quack.
Hi, I Boris. Hear fix bear, yes?
My employer recently adopted Sun's standards. They posted them here: http://developers.sun.com/docs/web-app-guidelines/uispec4_0/
I'm a software developer but have not had any formal training in UI design or look and feel. I'm looking for something more than just "keep it simple, stupid."
Then your proper response is, "Are you sure you want me to do this? I have no training in this area."
And put it in writing as a CYA.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Everything you need is right here.
This is the best website on design that I've found: http://webdesignfromscratch.com/
For searches like this, don't use Google or other search engines like it. Search people's bookmarks. http://del.icio.us/search/?fr=del_icio_us&p=design&type=all
I have a feeling that 99% of the replies here are misundertanding something crucial. And so is your employer, and so are you. (OK, so it's more likely I'm the one who doesn't understand. But hear me out.)
First off, what is a style guide?
Here's how I would define it.
A style guide is a document which prescribes standards for subjective matters of presentation, which are to be followed for material created within a specific framework. For example, the material might be written articles for publication in a newspaper. Or the material might be programs created to run on an OS, or with a GUI or application framework. Or C language source code written to be read and modified by a programming team.
A style guide's purpose is to enforce consistency among material created by multiple parties (or one party over multiple sessions). This consistency is for the benefit of the end user, not necessarily the creators. And the style guide is for use by the creators, not the end user
A style guide governs presentation, not content. Grammar and article length, not viewpoints or what gets discussed and what doesn't. How a pushbutton looks and behaves, not how it gets drawn on the screen. Code indentation and naming, not what the program does.
A style guide does not prescribe standards that are enforced elsewhere. It doesn't tell writers to properly end their sentences with punctuation, because that's a rule that applies to all writing. It doesn't say that scrollbars in a GUI should not be placed at 45-degree angles, because the GUI API provides no means to do so anyway. It doesn't say that curly braces must be balanced, because the compiler will catch that anyway.
A style guide is the sole authority on the issues it covers. If an issue within the domain of the style guide is not governed by it, then there is no rule on it.
A style guide prescribes standards as the preferred choice among various possible options, none of which is objectively correct or incorrect. The standards take the form of "for such-and-such, do it this... way, not that... way. There are some who do it that... way, but we do it this... way because such-and-such."
A style guide can not be legitimately created by someone who doesn't define the standards in it, and have the authority to decide what to prescribe.
So, if your employer is asking you to make a UI style guide for their software, there is a basic issue that you haven't explicity made clear:
Does this software provide a framework for creating material that should conform to some standard? You say you are creating a user-interface style guide, so is it a user-interface creation tool (or something that allows external components with their own user interfaces)? If that's not what your software does, and the user-interface you're referring to is something that your software uses, rather than provides, then your company is in no position to create a style guide (that is, define standards) for it. Whoever created the GUI (Windows? Mac? QT?..) has already done that, and chances are they've published it, and your software engineers have been following it. Any attempted style guide would be merely descriptive, not prescriptive. It would say "for such-and-such, our software does it this way...", possibly even while the actual standards say to do it that... way.
Now if your software is in fact a UI-creation tool and it's already been created, then allthe content that needs to go into your style guide is already in the heads of, or has already been written by, whoever created the software. You know who to talk to.
And if the software is UI-creation tool but you're still at the design stage, then what you're being asked to do is actually create the standards, not just write a document. Your employer is asking you, a software engineer with no UI expertise, to define the rules which all of your customers, as software developers, will be mandated to follow, and which will in