Human interface guidelines

Human interface guidelines (HIG) are

usability studies), but most are based on conventions chosen by the platform developers preferences. ^{[citation needed}

]

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 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

Mozilla Firefox's user interface, for example, goes against the GNOME project's HIG, which is one of the main arguments for including GNOME Web instead of Firefox in the GNOME distribution.^[1]

Scope

Human interface guidelines often describe the visual design rules, including icon and window design and style. Much less frequently, they specify how user input and interaction 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,

cross-platform

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.