Standards are set by national or international bodies, which ensure ‘compliance with a set of design rules by a large community’. (Dix et al. 1998:191) An example is the International Organization for Standardization’s ‘Software ergonomics for multimedia user interfaces’. (ISO 2002:3) ‘Incompleteness of theories underlying the design of interactive software makes it difficult to produce authoritative and specific standards’. Hence, most of the design rules for interaction design are in the form of general guidelines. These guidelines can be applied at various stages of the design. Generally, the more abstract the guideline, the more suitable it is in informing the earlier stages of design such as the requirements specification. More specific guidelines are most appropriate for detailed design. An example of a set of guidelines is the ‘Apple Human Interface Guidelines’. (Apple.com 2003:1)

These guidelines and rules have been formulated from design principles which are a derivative of ‘theory-based knowledge, … Read more