Effective organization of design guidelines reflecting designer's design strategies

Designing user interfaces is a complex task that needs to be supported by appropriate design guides. Out of various types of guides, design guidelines are collections of advice for user-interface designers and are publicly distributed in the form of books and reports. If applied well, these guidelines can reduce mental and physical stress on the part of the designers. However, existing design guidelines have several usability problems, e.g. designers have trouble in accessing and retrieving relevant guidelines, thereby not being used as an integral part of the design process.This paper aims to discuss how to organize design guidelines that will effectively support designer's behaviors. With this purpose, we performed an observational study to understand designer's behaviors. The study shows that designers frequently use heuristic knowledge on user's behavior and tend to apply familiar but previous design patterns or rules in their current design. To support these designer's behaviors, this paper suggests eight elementary user actions (EUAs) as a brief user model and the design guidelines organized by EUA. The effectiveness of the EUA-based organization on interface design was verified by comparing two other guidelines that have similar contents but different organization: design factors (DF) and ergonomic criteria (EC). The experimental results showed that both DF and EUA enabled the participants to more effectively retrieve interesting design guidelines and select the correct design guidelines closely related to their design context.Relevance to industryDesign guidelines are usually being used in almost all industries like digital appliances, Web, and automobile. This paper suggests that the design guidelines should have a multi-dimensional structure consisting of DF and EUA in order to support the designer's strategies in an integrated fashion.