ABSTRACT
Standards, guidelines, and style guides generally exist to improve the consistency of the user interface and improve the quality of interface components. They help specifiers procure systems and system components that can be used effectively, efficiently, safely, and comfortably. They also help restrict the unnecessary variety of interface hardware, software, and technology and ensure that the benefits of any variations are fully justified against the costs of incompatibility, loss of efficiency, and increased training time for users. Even standards that are still under development can have an impact on hardware and software development. The major suppliers play an active part in generating the standards and increasingly, they are incorporating the guidance on good practice into products before the standards themselves are published. In this chapter, we describe a number of human-computer interaction (HCI) standards that have been developed internationally and explain how they can be used in conjunction with other guidelines and style guides to improve user experience. Although designing usable systems requires far more than simply applying standards, guidelines, and style guides, they can, nonetheless, make a significant contribution by promoting consistency, good practice, common understanding, and an appropriate prioritization of user interface issues.
