The Good Old Styleguide in a New Light: Enabling a User-oriented Development Process

This paper gives an overview of the current situation and the experiences gained during the implementation of a user-oriented development process in a large Swiss financial services firm. Besides usability methods such as user and task analysis, early prototyping and usability testing in our in-house Usability Lab, we focus in particular on the support of a user-oriented process in the form of the introduction of a company-wide user interface styleguide. The related process contains early prototyping with a styleguide based prototyping tool, concrete suggestions for a consistent user interface design as well as pre-programmed components based on the styleguide. The styleguide and the defined and described interface elements serve as a common language for all the participants in a user-oriented process such as business representatives, users and IT developers.