User Interface Guidelines and Standards

ACM interactions, Volume 2, No. 1, pp. 5-7.

Gary Perlman, Ohio State University

The most relevant links are listed under Resources

Table of Contents

This is the third installment on resources on HCI. Since the first on the World-Wide Web (WWW), many of the resources have been updated, some with information from interactions, so you should look them up again. The FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions), covered in the last issue, also are updated periodically. In this Resources Department, I will cover guidelines and standards, many of which are available in electronic form. Guidelines have their limitations, but they can help generate ideas and resolve disputes in the absence of other information. And sometimes, you have no choice but to follow a standard.

Most of the information presented here is in my suggested reading list on HCI, User Interfaces, and Human Factors and Ergonomics. It is available at: http://www.acm.org/~perlman/readings.html. The full reading list covers general HCI, HCI education, user interface development, styleguides, and human factors and ergonomics. In this column, I will only cover readings on design guidelines and styleguides for specific platforms (e.g., Windows, Mac, Motif, ...). The general sources on HCI and user interface development will provide more context than the styleguides. I have noted which are available in electronic form and how to access them.

User Interface Design Guidelines

The following general guidelines may not address specific platforms, although many examples come from the most popular environments.

C. Marlin "Lin" Brown. Human-Computer Interface Design Guidelines. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corp., 1988. ISBN 0-89391-332-4. A good source of guidelines for graphical interfaces.

Deborah J. Mayhew. Principles and Guidelines in Software User Interface Design. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1992. ISBN 0-13-721929-6. This is an excellent practical guide for effective design.

Sidney L. Smith & Jane N. Mosier. Guidelines for Designing User Interface Software. ESD-TR-86-278. Bedford, MA 01730: The MITRE Corporation, 1986. This set of guidelines is widely used in military systems, but is based on mid-80s technology with little on graphical user interfaces. Tagged text and PostScript is available via anonymous ftp from: ftp.cis.ohio-state.edu in: /pub/hci/Guidelines/ or in HTML at www.hcibib.org/sam/. A variety of "front-ends" have been written for these guidelines. I wrote the first, NaviText SAM, which ran on DOS machines. Renato Iannella, while at Bond University, created versions for the Macintosh, BRUIT and later HyperSAM, which is available via anonymous ftp from kirk.bond.edu.au (131.244.1.1) in the directory /pub/Bond_Uni/hyperSAM or via the World-Wide Web at http://dstc.bond.edu.au:91776/hyperSAM.html. Also, researchers at MITRE, where the guidelines originated, have been working on a Mac interface called DRUID.

U.S. Department of Defense. Military Standard: Human Engineering Design Criteria for Military Systems, Equipment and Facilities. MIL-STD-1472D Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, March 14, 1989. Section 5.15 of this standard is largely drawn from the MITRE guidelines above. A Macintosh HyperCard stack, MIL-STK-1472, written by Andy Cohen is available via anonymous ftp from: ftp.cis.ohio-state.edu in: /pub/hci/1472/. It has cleverly designed dynamic diagrams. Don Monk at the Armstrong Laboratory at Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio has been working on a Macintosh hypertext system to provide MIL-STD-1472 and the following compendium.

Kenneth R. Boff & Janet E. Lincoln (Editors). Engineering Data Compendium: Human Perception and Performance. Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio: Harry G. Armstrong Aerospace Medical Research Laboratory, 1988. This report gathers and digests thousands of studies and is a great resource for designers concerned with HP&P.

International Standards Organization. Ergonomic Requirements for Office Work with Visual Displays Units (ISO 9241). There is an ongoing effort to produce an international standard on using computers in the office, addressing task requirements, workstation design, and software design.

Jean Vanderdonckt. "Tools for Working with Guidelines" Bibliography. University of Namur, Belgium, 1994. This collection has over 1200 references on using guidelines, pointers to guidelines sources, ideas for working with guidelines, and information on software tools for working with guidelines. A plain ASCII text document is available via anonymous ftp at: arzach.info.fundp.ac.be (138.48.4.5) in: /pub/papers/jvd/Tools_fww_Guidelines.txt. A World-Wide Web version is almost ready at that site, and Vanderdonckt is working on a Windows hypermedia for documenting use of the MITRE and MIL-STD-1472 standards.

Styleguides for Specific Platforms

The following styleguides define (or redefine) a standard to which all applications on that platform should conform. Thanks are due to Samu Mielonen, Univ. of Tampere, Finland, for compiling an earlier version of the styleguide list.

Aaron Marcus. Graphic Design for Electronic Documents and User Interfaces. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co. (ACM Press), 1992. ISBN 0-201-54363-9; ACM Order number 703900. This book contains many examples and includes a comparative study of graphical user interfaces on different platforms.

Apple Computer, Inc. Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1992. ISBN 0-201-62216-5. There is an interactive animated companion CD-ROM to these Mac guidelines called "Making it Macintosh", Addison-Wesley, 1993. ISBN 0-201-62626-8.

Commodore-Amiga, Inc. Amiga User Interface Style Guide. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1991. ISBN 0-201-57757-7.

GO Corporation. PenPoint User Interface Design Reference. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1992. ISBN 0-201-60858-8.

Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Sunsoft Inc. & USL. Common Desktop Environment: Functional Specification (Preliminary Draft). X/Open Company Ltd., 1993. ISBN 1-85912-001-6. Available as a UNIX compressed PostScript file via anonymous ftp from: XOPEN.CO.UK in: /pub/cdespec1/cde1_ps.Z. (The .Z suffix means that you need the UNIX uncompress program to create the PostScript file.)

IBM. Object-Oriented Interface Design: IBM Common User Access Guidelines. Carmel, Indiana: Que, 1992. ISBN 1-56529-170-0.

James Martin, Kathleen Kavanagh Chapman & Joe Leben. Systems Application Architecture: Common User Access. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1991. ISBN 0-13-785023-9.

Microsoft Corporation. The GUI Guide: International Terminology for the Windows Interface. Redmond, WA: Microsoft Press, 1993. ISBN 1-55615-538-7.

Microsoft Corporation. The Windows Interface: An Application Design Guide. Redmond, WA: Microsoft Press, 1992. ISBN 1-55615-384-8. Along with the above two publications, Microsoft provides an online visual design guide for its Windows development environments.

Open Software Foundation. OSF/Motif Style Guide. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1993. ISBN 0-13-643123-2. An online version of this standard is available in the Silicon Graphics IRIS InSight document system.

NeXT Computer, Inc. NeXTSTEP User Interface Guidelines (Release 3). Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Publishing, 1992. ISBN 0-201-63250-0.

Sun Microsystems, Inc. OPEN LOOK Graphical User Interface Application Style Guidelines. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1989. ISBN 0-201-52364-7.

Sun Microsystems, Inc. OPEN LOOK Graphical User Interface Functional Specification. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1989. ISBN 0-201-52365-5.

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