Why are style guides so frequently created, but so rarely successful? All too often, businesses ask for a style guide as a means to create a common look and feel, in the belief that it will solve usability problems and establish consistency between applications – only to be disappointed in the results. Even if such a style guide is followed carefully, the resulting interfaces may not meet usability goals.. This paper explores strategies for creating a style guide that is more than a simplistic rules book. By making the style guide part of the process, it can be used to promote a shared vision, to help the product meet business and usability requirements for consistency and…it may actually be used.

All too many projects to improve the usability of a user interface start with a request to create a style guide. To many user-centered designers, a style guide is the documentation of a design – the end of a design process – not a starting point for usability. And yet, we continue to create them, despite that fact that they may do little to address real usability problems or create a common approach to interaction. This paper describes some tactics and techniques for creating style guides that present and organize the appropriate information in a usable structure.

WHAT’S IN A STYLE GUIDE?
Style guides can be classified as platform (or language) guide, general design guides, or corporate style guides for a specific application. Although they overlap in many ways, each has a different focus.

Platform Guides
The vast majority of publicly-available guides are in the first category. These style guides focus on rules for presentation elements, including visual design elements such as color, logos, fonts or icons; page or screen layouts including spacing, justification and common items; and the correct usage for standard controls such as buttons, drop-down selections, radio button or check boxes.

This focus is understandable for style guides written for operating system platform or software languages. These guides must provide basic information for other groups using their tools to create software products, documenting the capabilities of the platform as well as providing guidance to designers. In Table 1, we see that the Java Look and Feel Guidelines and Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines have very similar tables of contents despite having been written in different eras (as computer eras go) and in different companies. The same general pattern is also followed in sections of the ISO 9241 Ergonomic Requirements for Office Work with Visual Display Terminals. Although this standard also includes guidance and requirements for physical interaction as well as two sections on task requirements and usability, most of the sections focus on visual display guidelines for dialogs, information, and user assistance.

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