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Guidelines and Standards

 

Guidelines and Standards are both ways in which design conventions are communicated to other designers and developers to try and promote consistent design (CITE). However, there are differences between the two that should be taken into account when developing and designing new products, systems or services.

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Design Guidelines tend to be more rules of thumb than formally-enforced rules.

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Design Standards tend to be more akin to actually formally-enforced rules than rules of thumbs. Companies or even governments can enforce these design standards.

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Although more abstract and not as applicable to specific scenarios, it is a good idea to keep up with what design guidelines and design standards exist for a potential project (Henninger, Haynes, & Reith, 1995).

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Smith, S., (1986) Standards versus guidelines for designing user interface software, Behaviour & Information Technology, 5:1, 47-61, DOI:10.1080/014492986089144

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Henninger, S., Haynes, K., & Reith, M. W. (1995). A framework for developing experience-based usability guidelines. In Proceedings of the 1st conference on Designing interactive systems: processes, practices, methods, & techniques (pp. 43-53). ACM.

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