Interface Guidelines
With each interface you come across, you have a different guideline set up (if this interface wants to stay consistent) and many of the popular GUIs (Windows, OS X, and Linux interfaces) all have their own guidelines to follow through with. Here are several resources regarding interfaces on some of the more popular ones:
- GNOME
- Tango Icon Theme
- KDE
- OS X
- Windows Vista (includes Aero, which is a major step in good guidelines)
Now, you may ask, why do they have guidelines? It’s pretty simple. Let’s say a developer with a very bright mind decided to make their own program with their own way of handling the application menus and made their program suited for their own liking, but they make it for Mac OS X. Ultimately, this program becomes very disliked by its end-users because of its lack of consistency with the operating system itself, which, by the way, if fictionally without its own guidelines, would be completely confusing to the users, trying to learn each and every single application all over again because the interfaces clash, and the system is a total mess. The point of keeping things consistent , in other words, helps users efficiently get something done, because they’ve already familiarized themselves with intuitive, guideline-based programs, and can get to work on stuff. In the next post, one new interface, the Ribbon (developed with the help of Microsoft) will be discussed.