Home: Guidelines

How to Use the Guidelines Sorting Tool Most Effectively

To Sort the Table and View a Guideline

You can sort the Guidelines table by: Chapter, Title, Relative Importance, Strength of Evidence, and Relative Score. To sort the table, click on any of the five column headers. To view a guideline, click on any of the guidelines in the ‘Title’ column and it will link directly to the appropriate page in the PDF (Acrobat Reader is required).

To View Background Information on the Guidelines

Visit the Background and Methodology section of the Guidelines for an explanation of the ‘Relative Importance’ and ‘Strength of Evidence’ rating scales. Visit Options for Implementing the Guidelines for ideas on how sorting the Guidelines can help you prioritize and implement them.

For a Description of Each Table Header

• Chapter
  You can sort each guideline by the chapter and guideline number that appear in the PDF version of the Guidelines.

• Title
  You can sort by alphabetical listing each guideline title. (Please note that each guideline title begins with an action verb like ‘use’ or ‘ensure’; therefore, this may not speed you up in finding a topic.) You can find a topic faster by using the Guidelines index at http://usability.gov/pdfs/index.pdf.

• Relative Importance
  You can sort the guidelines by ‘Relative Importance’. This will allow you to see which guidelines are the most important to the overall success of a website. When guidelines have an equal rating – for example there are 28 guidelines that rank as 5 bullets out of 5 for importance – these are ordered in priority based on the ‘Strength of Evidence’ associated with each. Therefore, of these 28 most important guidelines, the ones that have equally strong research to support them will appear first in the list.

• Strength of Evidence
  You can sort the guidelines by a ‘Strength of Evidence’ ranking. This will allow you to see what guidelines have the strongest research. As with the Relative Importance rankings, when a guideline has an equal rating – for example there are 27 guidelines that rank as a 5 bullets out of 5 for evidence – these are ordered in priority by the ‘Relative Importance’ associated with each. Therefore, of these 27 guidelines with strong evidence, the ones that have equally strong importance will appear first in the list.

• Relative Score
  You can sort each guideline by ‘Relative Score’. This artificial measure is a new feature that was not part of the original Guidelines. It is computed simply by multiplying the ‘Relative Importance’ and ‘Strength of Evidence’ scores. Therefore, if a guideline has a ‘Relative Importance’ score of 5 bullets and a ‘Strength of Evidence’ score of 5 bullets, the ‘Relative Score’ will be 25. This sort provides an alternate way of prioritizing the Guidelines.