Guidelines and Design

Jakob Nielsen recently published Employee Directory Search: Resolving Conflicting Usability Guidelines, in which he explains how usability guidelines often conflict each other and how to resolve it using empirical observation, theoretical analysis and trade-offs.

Christina Wodtke says he’s talking about design then makes an important point about the usefulness of guidelines:

This is called design. Thinking about a problem, and thinking up answers by looking at the world around us: design. Blindly adhering to guidelines is not design. Looking at guidelines and comparing them to the world and deciding if they are applicable to your unique situation: design.

Don’t get me wrong, I think guidelines are valuable. Often I come up against a usability problem and say to myself, “Hey it’s a proximity problem” and can fix it easily. But those guidelines have meaning to me because they represent compressed experience.

Be sure to check out the great reader comments that follow.