Support for Iterative User Interface Prototyping: The Sherlock Guideline Management System

Abstract

This paper is about supporting the difficult and non-trivial task ofuser interface design by providing effective human factors input toearly stages of system development. The work presented in this paper ismotivated by the normative perspective that tools for working withguidelines should provide a collaborative, extensible and evolutionarymedium, offering more than mere access to guideline reference manuals orhypertext retrieval, for early human factors design input. To thiseffect, this paper presents a novel method for working with guidelinesand a supporting tool environment, namely the Sherlock GuidelineManagement System. Sherlock provides an integrated environment forarticulating and depositing guidelines, accessing past experience andpropagating guidelines in the form of recommendations, to the userinterface development life-cycle. In this manner, persistency oforganisational knowledge on guidelines and evolution of the accumulatedwisdom are supported. Moreover, Sherlock provides facilities for theautomatic usability inspection of tentative designs. Finally, the paperdescribes the results of a preliminary evaluation of Sherlock.