Human interface guidelines

Their aim is to improve the experience for the users by making application interfaces more intuitive, learnable, and consistent.

Policies are sometimes based on usability studies of human–computer interaction, but most reflect the platform developers' preferences.

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.

Developers sometimes intentionally choose to break them if they think that the guidelines do not fit their application, or usability testing reveals an advantage in doing so.

Aside from the detailed rules, guidelines sometimes also make broader suggestions about how to organize and design the application and write user-interface text.