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

For a number of years, the primary medium for propagating human factors inp ut to interactive system development has been paper-based guideline referen ce 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 sy stem 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. S herlock builds upon and extends the results of previous efforts to address state of the art requirements and problems, as highlighted by recent practi ce and experience in the use of the current generation of guideline managem ent systems. In particular, Sherlock provides an integrated environment for articulating and depositing guidelines, accessing past experience, propaga ting guidelines/recommendations to the user interface development life-cycl e, and facilitating the automatic usability inspection of tentative design. Thus, Sherlock fosters persistency of organisational knowledge on guidelin es and evolution of the accumulated design wisdom. (C) 2000 Elsevier Scienc e B.V. All rights reserved.