Monday, March 16, 2009

Definition of Done: UI standards

If you are developing an application with a UI, I recommend adopting a set of UI standards or guidelines to ensure a consistent, high quality user experience. The standard forms a baseline expectation for the team and product owner eliminating the need to explicitly define mundane details for every screen for aspects such as tabbing through controls, initial cursor position, tool tips, progress bars, etc. Instead, those generally accepted best practices can be included in the team's "definition of done" (DoD) for each story / feature.

Here is a list of UI guidelines from Microsoft that can serve as a checklist for your UI. There are others out there, too. If you know a good one, please let me know.

2 comments:

Jay Wopschall said...

Yes, it's nice to see agile development begin to recognize the need for a quality usable experience. I spent much time trying to convince developers at boldtech to adopt UI patterns as guidelines. There are many great UI pattern libraries out there.

Michael Bolton http://www.developsense.com said...

Looking for UI design heuristics? Try here: http://www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/heuristic_list.html

---Michael B.