Integrated support for working with guidelines: the Sherlock guideline management system

Abstract

For a number of years, the primary medium for propagating human factors input to interactive system development has been paper-based guideline reference manuals. However, in the recent past, a number of tools for working with guidelines have emerged to ease the tasks of: (i) accessing and retrieving guidelines, (ii) applying recommendations to design prototypes, and (iii) facilitating a more effective human factors input to the early stages of system development. This paper presents a new way for working with guidelines and discusses the functionality, properties, typical use and evaluation of a supporting tool environment, the Sherlock Guideline Management System. Sherlock builds upon and extends the results of previous efforts to address state of the art requirements and problems, as highlighted by recent practice and experience in the use of the current generation of guideline management systems. In particular, Sherlock provides an integrated environment for articulating and depositing guidelines, accessing past experience, propagating guidelines/recommendations to the user interface development life-cycle, and facilitating the automatic usability inspection of tentative design. Thus, Sherlock fosters persistency of organisational knowledge on guidelines and evolution of the accumulated design wisdom.