Is it just me or are UX Playbooks, UX Pattern Libraries, UX Style guides not talked about enough and incorporated as often as UI style guides or brand style guides? Are these just buzzwords or do they really not matter? Or is there some kernel of truth and real benefit of creating them, be it in games or enterprise softwares and apps?
Before we start talking about the HOW, it is inherently important to ask WHY. Why do even need a UX Playbook, Pattern Library or Style Guide in first place?
The Origins
Style guides have been around for a long long while. Origin of style guides date back to advertising and branding times, when it became essential to come up with a set of rules around consistent brand representation as well as to distinguish products between the competition.
“A style guide is a document that provides guidelines for the way your brand should be presented from both a graphic and language perspective. The purpose of a style guide is to make sure that multiple contributors create in a clear and cohesive way that reflects the corporate style and ensures brand consistency with everything from design to writing.”_ Online Definition
Skype Brand Styleguide
Example: Skype's brand style guide calls out the correct & incorrect ways of using the logo.
Going back to the definition, here are a couple of thing which immediately jump out and the why style guides are so important:
Consistency across documents, screens and digital media in terms of brand and visual representation
Cohesiveness: All designers speaking the same language even if a change of guard happens, new designers can onboard quickly
Guidelines act as a rulebook to bring people back to original vision and make a case with multiple stakeholders
These reasons were quiet compelling as brands tend to be around for a really long time and there could be multiple people handling how the brand is used across print advertising, video ads, day to day stationary items and so on. Every brand had a unique image that it projects onto its customers. A unique voice, and to a great degree an underlying tone or attitude, that resonates with the end users of the product. There has to be certain rules to make sure whenever the brand appears in front of the public, those rules are followed so that the brand does not loose it’s voice & identity.
UI Style Guide
With UI design becoming mainstay of digital products, many products and UI designers maintain the best practices of having a UI style guide which dictates and harmonizes the UI of the entire game or the app; right from colors, to buttons, to UI elements, font styles to iconography etc.
Example: of a UI style guide, detailing colors, buttons and font usage rules
Is the same true for UX? I can say with conviction that
70% of the studios worldwide do not invest in a dedicated UX style guide
UX Style Guide : The Missing Link?
With UX gaining immense traction as a design discipline and getting embedded in the design and pre-production process, do you ever wonder if there should be a style guide exclusive to UX for exactly the reasons mentioned above to ensure consistency of UX principles, consistent rules that a project follows as well as to ensure multiple designers over time to share and speak the same UX vision & language?
In context of games, UX style guides need to become even more apparent compared to when we see game design disciplines having dedicated guideline documents
Game feature pre-production depends heavily on the following design disciplines:
Game Designers
UX Designers
UI Designers
Art
From the image above, it is quiet obvious how each traditional design discipline creates and maintains its own dedicated manual which is basically a set of guidelines that act as a map to keep coming back to as the project becomes more extensive but still keeping the original vision in place.
With games now moving towards more of “Games as a Service” (GaaS) model, many games will have shelf lives of over 6+ years; enough time for influx and outflx of core design team members.
