Interaction Design Pattern - Advantages Over Design Guidelines

Advantages Over Design Guidelines

Guidelines are generally more useful for describing requirements whereas patterns are useful tools for those who need to translate requirements to specific software solutions. Some people consider design guidelines as an instance of interaction design pattern as they are also common approach of capturing experience in interaction design. However, interaction design patterns usually have the following advantages over design guidelines:

1. Abstract guidelines, like the Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design by Shneiderman, do not suggest how to solve a problem like many interaction design pattern, and cannot be used for interdisciplinary communication. Furthermore, guidelines do not provide an explanation as to why a particular solution works.
2. Concrete guidelines, like Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines, are too tailored to a specific interface, and therefore are not as effective when applied to other interfaces (especially non-Macintosh interfaces).
3. Other problems with guidelines are that they tend to be too numerous which makes it difficult for designers to apply the right guidelines. Also guidelines assume an absolute validity while usually they can only be applied in a particular context. A result of that is also that guidelines often tend to conflict just because they lack describing a context.

Guidelines and patterns are not necessarily conflicting, and both can be used in conjunction to identify the problem and then create a valid solution.