RE: Need help creating a GUI Standards guide

["Lisa Wright" <liwright -at- uswest -dot- net>]

As Sharon Burton-Hardin notes, both Apple and Microsoft have GUI standards
from which you can begin your own internal GUI Standard. However, it's not
as simple as saying, "okay, we'll do it their way." There are lots of
issues:

1. What if you're programming in Java? You have four standard look/feel
sets, or you can design your own.
2. The stock GUI guides let you make choices, such as whether to have a
vertical or horizontal alignment for your dialog boxes and their buttons.
3. You have to pick the wording for buttons, dialogs, and error messages.
Mnemonics. Keyboard shortcuts.
4. There are lots of things that the stock GUI guides address in a general
way.

Other things to consider are any comments the developers need to add to
document their code, and any copyright requirements. Also, if you have
particular platform or other hardware/software specifications.

Don't expect your developers to read the entire Microsoft/Apple/Java
guideline. Your internal GUI document should highlight those really
important things in your user interface.

Also, try to make sure management is really going to hold the developers to
your guidelines. As the only person with any design experience, I am the GUI
standard enforcer, QA, and the author of the guidelines. However, my
director has not laid down the law with the developers, so I see the same
errors over and over. Grrr.

I don't have any suggestions for guides to model after. If I can ever get
the developers out of emergency operating mode, I'd like to do a little
usability study on _them_ to see if the format I picked is any good. (It's
good for a gal to have dreams...)

Lisa Wright
Technical Writer