Creating a Guideline Set

Overview

A guideline set is the foundation for your evaluations. It defines the criteria used to assess a flow and helps your team evaluate work consistently over time.

Think of it as a reusable internal standard for design quality. A well-structured guideline set helps teams evaluate work against the same criteria, identify recurring UX issues, and compare results more meaningfully over time.

What a Guideline Set Contains

A guideline set is made up of:

• Categories
• Guideline criteria

Categories act like top-level groupings for related criteria. They help you scope issues into meaningful areas such as accessibility, usability, customization, or security so evaluation results are easier to understand later.

Guideline criteria are the individual binary checks inside each category. During an evaluation, each criterion is reviewed as a clear pass or fail so the results stay consistent and useful for analytics.

Understanding Guideline Sets

Before you create one, it helps to understand the basic structure:

Guideline Set
├── Category: Navigation & Structure
│   ├── Question: Is the main navigation intuitive?
│   ├── Question: Can users find key features within 2 clicks?
│   └── Question: Is the hierarchy logical?
├── Category: Visual Design
│   ├── Question: Is the color contrast sufficient?
│   └── Question: Are buttons clearly distinguishable?
└── Category: Performance
    ├── Question: Do interactions respond immediately?
    └── Question: Are animations smooth?

This parent-child structure makes it easier to evaluate work consistently, isolate the types of issues that need attention, and reuse the same framework across multiple evaluations.

Create a Guideline Set

To create a guideline set:

1. Open Guidelines.
2. Start a new guideline set.
3. Choose Start from template or Start blank.
4. Enter the guideline set details.
5. Create the guideline set.

Choose a Starting Option

Start from template

This option is useful when you want to get started quickly. It gives you a ready-made structure that you can refine later.

Use this option if you want a strong starting point without building everything yourself.

Start blank

This option is useful when your team already knows exactly what criteria to use. It lets you create your own structure from scratch.

Use this option if you want full control from the beginning.

Guideline Set Fields

When creating a guideline set, you will enter:

• Name: The title of your guideline set.
• Description: A short summary of what the set is meant to evaluate.
• Version: A version label for the guideline framework you are using.

Use the version to distinguish meaningful changes to the guideline set over time. If your categories or criteria change in a way that would affect evaluations or trend tracking, create a new version instead of continuously changing the same set. This helps preserve history and keeps comparisons clearer.

Keep these details short and clear so the set is easy to recognize and reuse later.

After Creation

Once your guideline set is created, you can:

• Add and organize categories
• Add guideline criteria
• Reorder items
• Refine the set over time
• Reuse the set across evaluations for consistency
• Track changes more meaningfully in analytics

Each criterion also receives an auto-assigned ID based on its category. These IDs make it easier to reference specific criteria in tickets, reviews, and handoff notes.

This makes it easier to improve the set as your team learns more while still keeping evaluations aligned and easier to compare over time.

Best Practices

• Keep categories logical and easy to scan.
• Aim for a practical sweet spot. Too few criteria can limit the value of analytics, while too many can make evaluations slow and harder to maintain.
• Keep criteria objective, specific, and easy to evaluate consistently.
• Keep the structure stable if you want comparable results over time.
• Use Start from template for speed and Start blank for custom frameworks.

Next Steps

After creating your guideline set, continue with:

• Managing Categories
• Adding Questions
• Reordering Items