Guidelines are a tool: building a design knowledge management system for programmers
Mike Kuniavsky, Srinivas Raghavan · Conference on Designing for User Experience · 2005
This case study describes the creation of an internal design knowledge management tool for web developers as a means to encourage user-centered development practices. With a goal to shift a software development culture from waterfall-style to user-centered practices, the repository of knowledge and code is created as an incentive for programmers to create interfaces in a user-centered and consistent way.Several experimental techniques are used in development of the tool. The process treats software developers as a user group and approaches the creation of design guidelines as if they were a product. In addition, the use of agile software development techniques, as driven by interaction and interface design, coupled with off-the-shelf blog software as a extensible, lightweight content management system makes this an experiment on multiple levels.Results about the success of the experiment are still pending, but the authors are optimistic.