Guideline Goals

Don't create style guidelines just for the sake of having guidelines. Rather, make sure that you have specific goals for your guidelines and that satisfying these goals, not just following the specific guidelines, is your ultimate objective. I believe the following are reasonable goals for user interface style guidelines:

• Make appearance consistent The guidelines should promote interfaces that have a consistent appearance to help make them easier to understand and use. The user interface elements should look like they belong together.
• Make a company's image consistent The guidelines should help ensure that different programs produced by the same organization promote the same image.
• Simplify appearance and behavior The guidelines should promote interfaces that avoid unnecessary visual complexity and nonstandard behavior.
• Simplify development effort The guidelines should make user interface development easier for programmers so that they don't have to figure out routine details or make as many decisions.

This last goal is especially important. Effective guidelines should make the programmer's job easier, not harder. They should help the programmer get his work done, not interfere with it.

TIP

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Effective use interface style guidelines make your job easier, not harder.

Rigid enforcement of style guidelines shouldn't be necessary, since programmers should be able to tell when the guidelines apply and when they don't. Furthermore, the existence of guidelines shouldn't be used as an excuse to stop thinking. Blindly following the style guidelines in circumstances in which they are inappropriate doesn't make sense.

TIP

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Having user interface style guidelines doesn't mean that you can stop thinking.