State of the Art of Web Usability Guidelines

interpretation Concrete interpretation General guidelines Specific guidelines Standards Compilations of guidelines Style guides Ergonomic algorithms Design rules Figure 7 Guideline interpretation according to guideline source 6 Conclusion In this chapter, we highlighted that a profusion of web usability guidelines exists that does not facilitate the designer’s task to select and apply appropriate guidelines. Usability guidelines dedicated to the web should be clearly differentiated from guidelines for traditional GUI applications. Some sources, as standards, pretend to be general, embracing enough to accommodate a wide variety of design issues. While this assumption is probably true for traditional applications, it is unlikely to be the case for Web usability. Differences discussed in UI design and development both for GUI and the Web, the emergence of new questions for the web that were unprecedented, the rapid evolution of guideline types suggest that web usability guidelines should be treated separately. For example, GUI mainly focuses on guidelines for controls, while the Web divides guidelines for the navigation (the privileged interaction mode) and for forms, although Java applications can be considered similarly to GUI applications. Many wholes in usability knowledge still exist for the Web. To identify them, Basden (2003) used Dooyeweerd’s notion of irreducible aspects: the philosopher introduced a series of 15 aspect, each having a set of laws that enable meaningful functioning in everyday living. Basden (2003) then compared the Yale Style Guide (Lynch & Horton, 1999) with other style guides for the web to discover (Fig. 8) that some aspects are largely represented (e.g., spatial and movement in a web site are well described), while others remain underrepresented (e.g., the juridical aspect that discusses legal issues for the Web is rarely found, as well as ethical issues). Fig. 8 shows potential areas where a need for guidelines exists that is not filled, thus providing an opportunity for researchers.