Human Interface Guidelines
From Biocrawler, the free encyclopedia.
Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) is a software development document which offers application developers a set of recommendations for creating a common look and feel with other applications in a particular desktop environment, by enumerating specific policies. Policy decisions are often based on studies of human-computer interaction (so called usability studies), and the guidelines are typically aimed at user-friendliness and making the interfaces more intuitive.
Human User Interface guidelines will dictate a set of rules for general usability, as well as visual design including icons design and style, user input and interaction and language style. A HIG will probably also define standard terminology and semantics related to certain elements or actions.
The central aim of a HIG is to create a consistent experience across the environment (generally an operating system or desktop environment), including the applications 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 buttons and icons up to more complex constructions, such as dialog boxes.
HIGs should be taken at face value, the recommendations and advices are meant to help developers create better applications, but developers are naturally free to break them if they think that the guidelines does not fit their application. The only repercussion for doing so may be that the organisation publishing the HIG does not give the application its blessing. Mozilla Firefox's user interface, for example, goes against the GNOME projects HIG which is one of the main arguments for not including Firefox in the GNOME distribution.
See Also
External Links
- GNOME Human Interface Guidelines (http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/)
- KDE User Interface Guidelines (http://developer.kde.org/documentation/standards/kde/style/basics/)
- Apple HIG (http://developer.apple.com/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/OSXHIGuidelines/)
- Apple Human Interface Guidelines (http://developer.apple.com/documentation/mac/HIGuidelines/HIGuidelines-2.html)
- Microsoft Windows User Experience (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dnwue/html/welcome.asp)
- Windows XP - Guidelines for Applications (http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/hwdev/windowsxp/downloads/default.mspx)
