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

This paper is about supporting the difficult and non-trivial task of user interface design by providing effective human factors input to early stages of system development. The work presented in this paper is motivated by the normative perspective that tools for working with guidelines should provide a collaborative, extensible and evolutionary medium, offering more than mere access to guideline reference manuals or hypertext retrieval, for early human factors design input. To this effect, this paper presents a novel method for working with guidelines and a supporting tool environment, namely the Sherlock Guideline Management System. Sherlock provides an integrated environment for articulating and depositing guidelines, accessing past experience and propagating guidelines in the form of recommendations, to the user interface development life-cycle. In this manner, persistency of organisational knowledge on guidelines and evolution of the accumulated wisdom are supported. Moreover, Sherlock provides facilities for the automatic usability inspection of tentative designs. Finally, the paper describes the results of a preliminary evaluation of Sherlock.