Thanks everyone for the responses so far! Your suggestions and encouragement are remarkably helpful to me.
@sarah: Thats a good idea about asking the audience. I will talk to some designers. Also, the technology is ASP and we will be using master pages and modules that encapsulate the layout, the header, footer, and navigation. That will help maintain the consistency across all projects but the actual design work will still be done individually on each project. @dorelle: Forming a team was the first thing I did. I formed a working group of about 8 people across the corporation with at least one from each office (we are split up with about 6 offices). I need to get better about documenting our decisions. Some of them are simply general agreement, other times there is no agreement and I must just pick from the available proposed solutions. I also have a list of items that I need to user test, if I can find the time... The standards document is a web document that I maintain, and is accessible from the intranet. I also plan on creating a pdf version when its finished. @theresa: I'd like to get there, but there are many more than a dozen patterns I think. We currently have 3 distinct standards in use because our applications all originated from different companies because our company grows through acquisitions. In addition to that, we have a very diverse audience. We have apps for the patients, apps for the doctors, for the payers, even administrative apps that help setup and maintain our installations. The scope is really enormous. Another confounding factor, is that often our clients will rip off the header and footer, and just use a portal to show the content as part some larger site. @william: i agree that a unified interface is a step in the right direction. but is a new interface really going to stop designers from making bad design choices? There will only be a handful of users that will ever use more than one app because they are used by different audiences, so I cant rely on a unified interface solving anything (other than our apps will probably demo better to some exec). @renato: As others have suggested, using templated screens seems to be the way to go. And I planned on breaking it down to the element level. I'd love to have drag-and-drop components that they designers and developers can use, complete with code and all. But the task seems just impossibly large. How do I determine the best area to focus on? Thanks again for your responses, Brian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=43155 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
