We were commissioned by the European Patent Office to help them develop and implement a wide ranging ergonomics programme over a two-year period. The program was based on guidelines derived from the EC Directive on Display Screen Work. The guidelines are a high level policy statement agreed by the President and the General Advisory Council and the technical content is contained in a series of working documents. Three of these are concerned with HCI issues. Two of the working documents (concerning usability specification and testing and user involvement techniques) form part of the Project Managers Handbook, a formal statement of procedures for major automation projects. The third working document is a user interface style guide for future systems developed under IBM CUA/Presentation Manager for OS/2 v2.x.

Our role was to draft all the initial material, facilitate the consultation and internal review process and finalise the approved texts and procedures. Having helped establish an appropriate infrastructure, we have recently been working with two internal project teams developing simulations of future electronic working methods. The teams are based in the Hague and in Munich and are concerned with developing support tools for Search Examiners (Next Examiners WorkStation - NEWS) and for Substantive Examiners (Computer Assistance for Substantive Examiners - CASEX) respectively. Our role is to integrate the two approaches and develop and run usability testing procedures to identify what functionality will be required by examiners (especially when search and substantive roles are combined in the future) and how best it should be made available. This involves developing and testing task scenarios which users work through on a simulated system or 'maquette' (simulated using a GPF package with additional Visual Basic modules).