UX Guidelines- My 10 Rough Guides
I’m really partial to a set of guidelines. I think guidelines provide a simple set of rules and best practice theories that aid both experts and novices in any particular task. Through a long process of trial and error, guidelines provide tangible evidence of where we have been and what we have learnt. Sometimes when I think of UX in a heuristic approach I wonder if that is just a massive contradiction. How can we claim a design is user-centred when we have not spoken to a single person within a target audience about it? I suppose, sometimes, you just have to expect when you have spoke to a thousand people you are going to produce repetition and patterns. Within my experience, I am able to put just a few of these patterns together to create my own set of guidelines. I’m not claiming these are any better or even on a par with the guidelines well documented by the likes of Jacob Nielsen or Steve Krug but these have worked best for the experiences put in front of me so far. They are themselves based on those I have read previously from Nielsen and Krug as well as other bloggers / writers I have come across, such as Whitney Hess and Andy Budd. I suppose it’s just a matter of adding your own flavour to these UX recipes that have been handed around. These are not meant to be strict rules, just simply a starting point. You may find some of these are more applicable to some set of circumstances than another and that’s fine. You may also find that commercial pressure makes all of these completely out of reach, or technically it’s really difficult to implement this – which is also fine. Just keep some values in the back of your mind as set of goals you are trying to reach with your projects.
Jay’s UX Guidelines