The Usability Design Guide (UDG) Tool

{NSF, Basic, Intel}

Informal survey among Web application designers at a large, well-known company:

• most designers do not use guidelines
• those who di, find them difficult to locate and apply
• most designers feel they don't get the benefits they should from design guidelines
• most designers feel that guidelines could and should lead to better designs, but are in a form that is too vague and too general to apply to specific situations
• existing guidelines are often only for GUIs and are not necessarily applicable to the Web, virtual environments, voice interaciton, cell phone interfaces, or PDAs

Another good reason for guidelines: to incorporate organizational style guides for consistent look and feel and organizational "branding"