A Deliberation Theory-Based Approach to the Management of Usability Guidelines

Designing interaction entails addressing multiple issues and challenges, ranging from the technical and economic to the legal and ethical. Usability guidelines recommend or prescribe courses of action and thus play a significant role in designing usable systems. This paper argues that approaches to guidelines need to support processes of deliberation and tradeoff and suggests a deliberation theory-informed model for the organization of guidelines. The model integrates concepts from Habermas’ discourse theory and Toulmin’s model of argumentation to categorize and represent guidelines. In addition, the paper presents two explorative studies conducted to understand the representational fit of the suggested categories to the domain of guidelines. The studies specifically consider the characteristics of coverage and encodability and also explore difficult cases. Finally, a brief summary of the usability evaluation results of the prototype that instantiated the proposed model is provided. This paper contributes to research and praxis by providing a theory-based model and a prototype for the management of guidelines.