Reading group report

Topic: Design guidelines
Date: June 7, 2004

The aim of this session was to introduce the topic of design guidelines.

Design guidelines are widely used
Design guidelines are an attempt to capture knowledge and pass on to less experienced designers (Rabourn)
Trouble is, there are lots of guidelines around, and many of them conflict with each other (Spool)
Some guidelines are written in broad language and subject to interpretation (Spool criticising Nielsen's ecommerce guidelines)
Does using design guidelines result in a more usable site? Some think this is doubful (Spool)
Guidelines aren't the problem, their misapplication is (Rabourn)
Using untested guidelines can be dangerous (Spool)
Useful guidelines need to reveal their etiology (Rabourn)
Use evidence-based guidelines (Rabourn)
"Web usability guidelines are very sensitive to the nature of the tasks and the subtle differences in the content of the site" (Spool)
"Usability guidelines always need to be applied with a certain amount of understanding as to when they apply and when they don’t apply" (Nielsen cited in Rabourn)
An alternative to using guidelines is to use competitive analysis including usability testing of similar websites to generate your own guidelines using your own users (Spool)

Six people attended this session. There were apologies from Daniel May, Shanan Holm, Stephanie Foott, Dey Alexander:

Each gave a 99 second (or thereabouts) presentation based on the readings. Presentation themes included:

Experience of guidelines at Monash, attitudes about guidelines "destroying creativity" and leading to boring uniformity
Theme in both articles is evolution, guidelines will and need to evolve within a community
Guidelines = expert opinion, useful under time constraints, need to consider underlying principles of guidelines
Should guidelines be based on how people actually use the web or should there be a teaching element in them? (Note: we must design to fit human behaviour, not to try to change it!)
Guidelines should be adapted through an iterative process, once in use find out how they're working
Guidelines are like expert opinion, able to be learned

After the presentations, the group discussed the following questions:

Spool says guidelines are a problem. Rabourn says it's their misapplication that's the problem. Who do you think is right?
Rabourn says we should used guidelines based on research. How might you account for what Spool found when evaluating the claims made by SURL on placement of objects on a web page?
Spool appears to be having a dig at Nielsen, and says "Web usability guidelines are very sensitive to the nature of the tasks and the subtle differences in the content of the site", yet Rabourn cites Nielsen as saying "Usability guidelines always need to be applied with a certain amount of understanding as to when they apply and when they don’t apply". Do Spool and Nielsen really disagree?
So if guidelines are meant to pass on knowledge to the less experienced as Rabourn says, but we need knowledge of how and when to apply them, as Spool and Nielsen say, then how useful are they to the novice designer?