It is still debatable as to the best time to employ design guidelines within the development process. General design guidelines have been cited as being of limited use during the software development phase. Blatt & Knutson (1994) state that many human factors specialists do not appear to have fully considered the developer’s task while constructed the design guidelines. The developer, in the role of user and implementer of the guidelines appears to be forgotten in the quest of addressing the needs of the end user. The requirements of the developer to have interactive examples to follow are disregarded resulting in limited success in applying the principles in the guides (Blatt & Knutson, 1994).

Design guidelines can also miss their target audience. Although usability techniques and processes such as requirements analysis and heuristic evaluation are published and widely available in technical journals and internal company reports, there remains a large community of interface designers who continue to be unaware of this information and its applicability to their situation.

Designers often state that guidelines are too general to be useful in their specific environment. In the case of Web design, Schneiderman argues (1997) that specific Web guidelines are still relatively rare because there has been insufficient expertise, experimentation and hypothesis testing carried out so far to clarify web specific design issues. Even the best of those who have attempted to offer guidance can provide only broad recommendations for web design that may leave designers with too many uncertainties.

However, there are some wide-ranging multimedia design guidelines available that profess validity in multimedia situations:

Smith, Parks & Newman (1997) identified the following criteria for User Requirements in Multimedia Information Systems.

User of multimedia information systems should, with ease, be able to:

1. Obtain the required information when requested
2. Find the information required through expected locations
3. Be able to identify the meaning of a link, so that the page fetched matches expectations
4. Be able to get an overview of the information available
5. Be able to selectively inspect the information using an overview as a guide
6. Be able to browse to find related information once a primary task is complete

Copyright EMMUS 1999.
Last updated: September 27, 1999.