What are standards?

Standards are agreed upon conventions for a particular process or visual pattern based on research and proven best practices. They provide a basis for commonality across many diverse things. They allow us to learn something once, and employ it in multiple places. An example of a well know interface standard are the simple button icons used in rich text editing toolbars for bold, italic and underlined text. The B is Bold, the I is italic and the U is underlined. (more…)