Human interface guidelines
Human interface guidelines (HIG) are documents which offer application developers a set of recommendations. Their aim is to improve the experience for the users by making application interfaces more intuitive, learnable, and consistent. Most guides limit themselves to defining a common for applications in a particular . The guides enumerate specific policies. Policies are sometimes based on studies of (so called), but most are based on arbitrary conventions chosen by the platform developers.
The central aim of a HIG is to create a consistent experience across the environment (generally an or ), including the and other tools being used. This means both applying the same visual design and creating consistent access to and behaviour of common elements of the interface - from simple ones such as and up to more complex constructions, such as .
HIGs are recommendations and advice meant to help developers create better applications. Developers sometimes intentionally choose to break them if they think that the guidelines do not fit their application, or reveals an advantage in doing so. But in turn, the organization publishing the HIG might withhold endorsement of the application. 's user interface, for example, goes against the project's HIG, which is one of the main arguments for including instead of Firefox in the GNOME distribution.
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Scope
Human interface guidelines often describe the visual design rules, including icon and window design and style. Frequently they specify how user input and mechanisms work. Aside from the detailed rules, guidelines sometimes also make broader suggestions about how to organize and design the application and write user-interface text.
HIGs are also done for applications. In this case the HIG will build on a platform HIG by adding the common semantics for a range of application functions.
Cross-platform guidelines
In contrast to platform-specific guidelines, guidelines aren't tied to a distinct platform. These guidelines make recommendations which should be true on any platform. Since this isn't always possible, cross-platform guidelines may weigh the compliance against the imposed work load.
Examples of HIG
- ()
- (for Windows 7 and Windows Vista)
- , a cross-platform HIG