My team and I are working on a style guide for our programs that will be both in the form of webapps and programs. While creating this style guide, we are researching common practices in order to make using our product as easy as possible for the end user. After several hours of searching for standards related to notifications, warnings, and messages, we are coming up short.
Specifically, with messages, we are looking for when to use things like "Yes" "No" versus "Accept" and "Cancel" - Are they context dependent? Or should we keep them consistent so the user does not get confused? EDIT: I found this to answer my question: Should I use Yes/No or Ok/Cancel on my message box?
With notifications - Are there any standards as far as a notification bar goes? How many messages are displayed at once?
Warnings - Is there a user preference as to provide more information with warnings (like a tooltip) that describes the warnings in a little more detail so that they don't get confused as to what it means, and so that they stay in the loop and understand what the system tried to do.
We've checked the ISO, and found some good standards on other things like icons, and general interface design, but notifications (as far as we could tell) are not on there.
My initial guess is that something like this does not exist, but I wanted to ask you guys.
Does anyone know of a good resource to find these standards (if they exist)?