My past week at work mainly involved updating our standards/style guide website for our company. I found the task unusually difficult – possibly because I decided just last week to focus on designing and design work, possibly because I subscribe to agile methods, which are not so hot on time-consuming deliverables, and possibly because updating standards is just plain boring.
I was educated in classic HCI and usability methods, however, and so I do believe in the value and important of style guides and standards – particularly in an organizational context.
This rambling post is an attempt to explore the value of standards at my company, as it is not entirely clear to me at the moment.
The purpose of our corporate style guide is to support the development of a unified and usable product suite that presents consistent branding, interaction, and navigation to our users. Our site is a resource for internal developers/designers when designing or redesigning products.
The purpose of my design work is to create a product that supports user processes and needs, to provides a user experience that supports my companies brand goals, and to do this with the minimum amount of complexity during product development.
Of course, sometimes standards and optimal product design bump heads. The simplest design that could be created for a new product will not always comply to the standards defined for a set of existing products. While the standards we define related to terminology or colour palette are definitely valuable, the value of other standards that we are defining related to interaction style is still unclear to me. We often create an entirely new design for a new product, e.g. with a different navigation structure to support a more complex product, which makes any standards for application navigation somewhat irrelevant.
Our solution for this has been to create a “style guide” along the lines of Microsoft Vista User Experience Guidelines. We have certain standards related to look and feel of elements in a page, and provide examples of good design, but leave it open regarding the layout of a given product. We spent this week creating a solid basis for the style guide, including basic screens, widgets, pop-ups, and navigation, but since the standards are in their infancy (we have not yet created a full-scale product with them as a basis), we plan to update and add new items as we move forward on our project work.
The worry I have is not the use and value of this guide within our project team – this is clear. What is not so clear is the use and value of the standards to the rest of the company (and why I am spending all this time on a nice website so that the standards are accessible to them). If we continually change and update our “standards” they are not really standards. And style guide only has value to the rest of the company if people are motivated to learn it and follow it.
A company like Microsoft has the advantage that they have already gone through many iterations of products and have a good idea of what kind of standards and guides they need to provide. Even they (or perhaps I should say especially they), however, have problems. At a talk regarding standards at CHI 2008, the Microsoft representative basically admitted that Microsoft had a number of different standards floating about, and no single body overseeing standards development within the company. I totally understand this. Too many standards basically stifle creativity, and the ability to explore better interaction design using new technologies/ideas. I don’t want to imagine political battles that a “standards police” could get into when trying to pull together a single standard from the work going on in many different projects.
Bringing this back to my own work…we have one basic ‘portfolio’ team which the UX team is part of, but there are several other development teams working on customer projects and making changes to existing products. I realize now what part of my reluctance in making our style guide. At a company like Microsoft, they have teams of designers working on their products that will actually read the user experience guidelines. At my company, we have teams of developers who are under a lot of pressure from customers (usually a 2-6 week time-frame for each project), and who are very unlikely to read and apply design guidelines, especially when adhering to such guidelines would mean that they would have to push to extend the project deadline.
Perhaps the solution here is that the UX department needs to do some aggressive marketing of our style guide to management and developers. The more I consider the problems I face everyday as a UX designer, the more I find that culture and awareness of UX issues are just as, if not more important than any standards, process or individual activity.
…
You know, I have a quote sitting on my desk at home, exactly because I know that I have the tendency to overthink things: “There is no solution, because there is no problem.” I wonder if this is true for this direction of thought. Perhaps the relationship between development, design, and standards is simply one of growth and simultaneous evolution. One changes the other, and eventually there will come a time for change e.g. an overhaul of the style guide, or a redesign of all existing products.
Maybe I just need to accept this and move on 
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