Credit Suisse Patterns Library

Initial Situation

Credit Suisse has a total of around 1000 IT projects underway. In many of these, the screen design is created by the business, by requirements engineers or by developers, none of whom have a solid education in interaction design.

At the Global Front Solutions (GFS) department, there are several dozen projects where, according to the current development process, the screen design is done by requirements engineers. The CS Marketing Department "Corporate Web" provides CS GUI Design Guidelines as a basis and for further questions of interactive web design (for the Global Front Solutions Department) so-called "GFS GUI Principles", which regulate questions such as "How should the GUI look/behave so that the user can add a column to a table?

The CS GUI Design Guidelines are available in a large PDF file, the GFS GUI Principles are documented in an Excel table and additional PowerPoint slides. These are not exactly user-friendly forms to help requirements engineers in their task of designing user-friendly and guideline compliant screens.

Objective

In this real-world project, the user requirements for a "GUI Patterns Library" will be collected and a prototype will be developed.
The scope looks like this:

Describe a significant number of GUI Patterns
These patterns structure
Make the structured patterns available as a web solution (prototype) for Screen Designer ("GFS GUI Patterns Library")
Testing the "GFS GUI Patterns Library" for usability with Requirements Engineers

The objective was to define the scope in the best possible way according to
Quesenbery with the following weighting.

Gathering the requirements

Due to the goals of this project, it was decided that the main method would be individual interviews with requirements engineers, business analysts and GUI experts.

After the interview phase and with the experience gained, personas and some scenarios were designed. This should help in the development of the prototype, so that the goal of finding a suitable GUI pattern for the different user types (represented by the personas) can be achieved as quickly as possible.

Card-Sorting" was used as another technique. This was used to check the rough structuring, which was designed as a result of the interviews, and to make the fine tuning.

The prototype was tested in different development phases by the interview partners in a "Mini-UseLab".