The Industrial Design / Human Interface Group at Xerox is responsible for the delivery of user interface design for most Xerox products across the enterprise. As a member of that group, I, as well as several of my co-workers, recognized that internal graphics creation and delivery processes within our department had to improve in order to deliver design that met Xerox's initiative to bring coherent user-interfaces to the marketplace. We felt that using technology, we could begin to eliminate redundant graphics development, increase reuse of corporate standard graphics, speed up the graphics creation time, and provide a repository for delivered work.

What we decided to do was form a team of visual designers and usability experts to meet on a weekly basis to develop corporate UI graphics standards, and judge newly created graphics against those standards. We also decided to build a database of those standards that could be used by the design department, and the Corporation at large, to house these valuable corporate assets, and in the end, decrease the time it takes to deliver a coherent Software interface.

The database was created using Extensis Corporation's Portfolio 4.0 and PortWeb running on a Windows NT Server. The database is populated using the Portfolio client, and then is browsed through a web user interface. As standards are processed on a weekly basis, the results of those findings are entered directly into the database for designers to be able to see the results of their submissions to the team. In addition, benchmark graphics, and any graphics that were delivered on past products are added to the database with metadata that can help the casual browser who is looking for an idea to base an icon on, to be able to get inspiration quickly.

The use of the database has steadily increased since its introduction in July 1999. Using the database, design productivity can be increased by 50-90% over past create-from-scratch processes. The database has also increased User Interface coherence which in the end leads to increased transfer of learning from product to product.