design standards
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If you have more than 1 or 2 people building the product, you need a Design Standard, also known as a Style Guide. Without a Style Guide everyone will do something different.

Although that is not necessarily a disaster, it will be more expensive to fix later on.

Design Standard defines ...spacer
The Design Standard should define what the product will look like:
  • which fonts and colours will be used
  • how screens will be laid out
  • where product and company logos are used

In short how the Branding will be applied.

Branding
But it should also define:
  • Mouse behaviour
  • Keyboard shortcuts
  • Menu and toolbar structures

In short how the user will interact with the product.

User interaction
A typical Design Standard is about 30 to 40 pages long. Any more and it begins to become unreadable. An alternative is to build an Internal Web Site that does the same job. 30 to 40 pages
A typical content list for a design standard might include:
  1. Basic Principles
  2. Description of user types (A user catalogue) if the standard is oriented to a specific application
  3. Technology constraints (e.g. monitor size)
  4. Branding rules
  5. Toolbar, Menu, Mouse, and Keyboard behaviour
  6. Terminology
  7. Feedback (mouse pointers, wait dialogs etc.)
  8. Types of On-line Help and Error Messages
Example Content List
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