Portals for Development and Use of Guidelines and Standards

Abstract

Nowadays, guidelines and standards play a key role in the adoption of (computer) technologies by industries and society. In essence, they constitute a rapidly evolving medium for transferring established and de facto knowledge to various guidelines and standards in order to achieve consistency and user-friendliness of user interfaces, especially in cases where complex and rapidly evolving technologies are employed. Despite the indisputable value and importance of such knowledge, several studies investigating the use of guidelines and standards by designers and developers (e.g., Wandke & Hüttner, 2001) have concluded that they are frequently ignored. This is attributed partly to the fact that such knowledge is not easily exploitable (Tetzlaff & Schwartz, 1991), and partly to their incarnation medium (i.e., paper based-manuals) that usually raises issues of ineffectiveness and lack of user-friendliness (e.g., Bevan & Macleod, 1994).