Independent Human Interface Guidelines

An anonymous reader alerts us to the IndieHIG Wiki, which is an independent effort to pick up the ball that Apple has dropped on human interface guidelines (can you spell FTFF?). From the wiki: "The IndieHIG project is an initiative created out of the necessity to document the new look and feel aspects of the Mac OS X experience, outside of the supervision of Apple itself. The project is not intended to replace, but rather to supplement the somewhat dated Apple Human Interface Guidelines (HIG). There are many instances of Apple using new and experimental interface styles, spurring developers to emulate these styles in their own applications. Unfortunately, because Apple provides neither guidelines nor code for developers to work with, the implementation of these interface styles and features by third parties can be lopsided and directionless. The IndieHIG intends to change this by providing a comprehensive set of guidelines governing the use and appearance of new, undocumented interface elements so that their implementation by third party developers adheres to the unwritten standards that Apple has set."

UI standards wouldn't hurt

[Nefarious Wheel]

As in the auto industry, placement of standard controls in the user interface make everyone comfortable enough with the technology to promote universal usage. How they connect, their feel etc. leaves everyone a bit of leeway to play with the design, but there are those first moments when you immerse yourself into a technology where you neither want nor need to think about how to begin. The initial controls should be familiar to all.

Dumb mistake, Apple

[Spunkemeyer]

Why would they let the Human Interface Guidelines langush? The consistency of the experience in using a Mac is a big plus. But, given the number of inconsistencies that have crept into OSX the past few versions, it's completely obvious to see it hasn't been a priority to them.

Typical

[ThePub2000]

Guess someone has to pickup where Apple leaves off, it's just too bad that Apple is so set in not continuing all those years of solid UI studies they funded and documented themselves.

Re:Giddyup!

[YrWrstNtmr]

Microsoft has had design and UI guidelines out forever. An awful lot of 'developers' do not know, or fail to heed..but they've been out there.

Maybe KDE & Gnome Folk Will Read...

[Anonymous Coward]

Can anyone explain how both KDE and Gnome have been working for years with the entire open source development world supporting them and they can't make anything even remotely close to the polish and UI level of this:

http://images.apple.com/macosx/leopard/images/inde xdesktop20060807.jpg [apple.com]

Do the toolkits just suck that much?
Do the developers just suck that much?

Shit brown desktop colours.
Jarring font alignments, positioning, and rendering.
Amateurish UI element spacing and layouts.

And the first person to say the worlds 'pretty' or 'skin' gets a beating...

Re:Maybe KDE & Gnome Folk Will Read...

[Anonymous Coward]

Can anyone explain how both KDE and Gnome have been working for years with the entire open source development world supporting them and they can't make anything even remotely close to the polish and UI level of this

I'm going to state the obvious and get flamed for it: "bazaar-style" open source works for developing things developers want, and not so well for developing things they don't personally care about. Since novice users are--almost by definition--not developers, UIs suitable for novices don't get developed very quickly. Various Linux distros are finally catching up, but that's only because you're starting to see more corporate/organized interest in open source development. "Scratching an itch" just doesn't work as a motivation for developing a polished UI, except for that rare developer with an overriding sense of aesthetic responsibility.

This isn't intended as a slight against FOSS developers--I've developed Open Source software my self (and not done a very good job on the interface because I didn't need it to be polished)--just an observation that people are most likely to volunteer their time to do things that interest them personally.

Re:Maybe KDE & Gnome Folk Will Read...

[zsau]

-1 Troll. You can't use that picture as a comparison of free desktops and Mac OS X. It's so low-res, the only thing you can see in that picture of any consequence is OMG SHINY AND BRIGHT COLORS which are really quite irrelevant.

If you could provide specific examples of how, for instance, Gnome or KDE have "amateurish UI element spacing and layouts", that'd be useful. Otherwise, why talk?

Re:Giddyup!

[PenguSven]

By "an awful lot" you're including 98% of Microsoft staff, right?

They're guidelines, not commandments.

[Tickletaint]

When you start applying them as though they were cold, autistic rules, you start degrading usability. Emerson said it better than I ever could, but I will say this: Judicious use of dissimilar UI paradigms can emphasize the aspects of your application that are dissimilar to others, the aspects that need special attention from the user. Not everything should be treated the same.

That said, there are plenty of amazingly talented programmers who turn out to be rather shitty UI designers. While guidelines like the Mac OS X HIG are most useful in the hands of designers who already know what they're doing, I suppose as a cheat sheet for coders who have nowhere else to seek advice, they're better than nothing.

Re:Dumb mistake, Apple

[datapharmer]

No, it is bigger than that... Take for instance the latest version of iphoto: when you click the red circle on a window, it should close the window but leave the program running. This has been true of OSX since the beginning, but in iphoto and a number of recent apple apps when you click the red circle it actually exits the program. This confused me the first couple times I used it and is only true with the latest version of iphoto. I assume this change and some others are aimed to make the programs act more similar to windows so converts feel more comfortable after then change-over, but this is a serious UI problem since it causes inconsistencies between programs. There are other problems, but I thought I would point this one out as it can be very annoying.

stuck up ...

[typidemon]

It's the entire 'fuck non-technical users" attitude that spews forth from highly technical users that has hurt nix distributions hard.

Re:UI standards wouldn't hurt

[Anonymous Coward]

Cars all have the same function. Cars take you places.

Computer programs do not all have the same function. Photoshop does not do remotely the same job that gcc does, and neither are much like Doom. There's no reason for all programs to be force-fit into identical interfaces.

Aqua's a wimp.

[dwater]

The thing that bugs me about both Mac OS X's Aqua (and MS Windows) is how the window manager seems to have so little authority over the windows it manages.

On SGI IRIX's 4Dwm, for example, if I use the window manager to minimise a window (by clicking on the minimise button, for example), it damn well minimises, no matter what state the window's application is in.

Why is Aqua's (and MS Windows's) window manager such a wimp? They have no authority over their windows at all. What kind of manager is that?

Re:Maybe KDE & Gnome Folk Will Read...

[drew]

Well, I'm not going to complain too much. I prefer useful to pretty.

Re:Maybe KDE & Gnome Folk Will Read...

[furball]

The toolbar: large icons waste space.

Toolbar icons icons have multiple sizes. Check out this tip [stevenf.com]. It's like someone sat down and said, "Hm. How do we make this work for different types of users?"

Re:Maybe KDE & Gnome Folk Will Read...

[overunderunderdone]

Another complaint I have is that FOSS GUIs tend to rely a lot on toolbars and icons. Although this isn't necessarily a terrible thing in and of itself

Actually it is. There is a UI principle: "a word is worth a thousand pictures." Icons are only useful if you already know them by sight and/or their meaning is painfully obvious, and even then only when there isn't too much visual clutter from a bunch of other icons around them making the user have to hunt for the particular one they want. The need for "Tooltips" is a clear sign of a bad UI. It always seemed to me that the MacOS got this, while Microsoft didn't. It's ironic that Apple which popularized icons as a UI element has always used them much more sparingly than Microsoft. It's as though Microsoft coming in later to the game said: "So they want pictures do they... well! We'll give them pictures out the yazoo" without ever fulling understanding the point of those "pictures".