Designing for Usability with Cots: How Useful is a Style Guide?

The recent increase in the use of Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) equipment and software in future military procurements creates a variety of challenges for human factors practitioners to address. There is a need to tailor our approach in order to provide suitable human factors tools to support the design of COTS-based systems. The human factors approach adopted, and experiences gained, in the development of a command planning aid are reported. This system, which is currently under development, utilises a large number of COTS products together with significant bespoke software development. It is one of the first major procurements in the United Kingdom to be based heavily around the use of COTS. A major challenge has been to optimise the usability of the overall system by providing future users with as seamless as possible integration of the various COTS products, rather than a series of unrelated, separate applications. One of the main activities has therefore been the design of the human-computer interface (HCI). A comprehensive Style Guide was developed against which the proposed COTS products could be evaluated, and new bespoke software could be designed. This paper evaluates the utility of a Style Guide in this context, and reports a number of lessons learned from our experiences.