Apple Human Interface Guidelines (1995)[pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Apple Human Interface Guidelines (1995)[pdf]

apps.hci.rwth-aachen.de

25 pointsneilpanchal7 comments

Interesting to see "Forgiveness" listed as one of the core Human Interface Principles:

"Forgiveness means that actions on the computer are generally reversible. People need to feel that they can try things without damaging the system; create safety nets for people so that they feel comfortable learning and using your product."

I feel that forgiveness/reversibility of actions is really helpful in exploring and learning the capabilities of applications.

> Note, however, that when options are presented clearly and feedback is appropriate and timely, learning how to use a program should be relatively error-free. This means that frequent alert boxes are a good indication that something is wrong with the program design.

Too many applications suffer from alert box overuse leading to alert fatigue, negating the effect of an alert box.

Similar, one thing I've always liked about applications adhering to these guidelines is that actions that are not possible should be disabled (greyed out), instead of punishing the user with an alert message when the clicked a button. "Didn't you know it was wrong to click the delete button when no item in the list was selected to be deleted, you stupid human!".

I've been keeping copies of the HIG for years because the advice has been watered down over the years. The 1992 HIG is the oldest one that I have. The 1995 version is mostly edits and minor revisions. The 2006 version was heavily adapted and as we moved from Mac OS to iOS more and more of the good bits were dropped from the guidelines.

Chapter 1 is a great example, you can't find anything similar in the current HIG.

> I've been keeping copies of the HIG for years because the advice has been watered down over the years. The 1992 HIG is the oldest one that I have.

Could you tell me where to find those?

I've recently read High Performance HMI [1], highly recommend for anyone implementing user interfaces for safety critical systems, even if your company has external consultants to sign off. In a more general sense, I find it valuable to study these and see what parts I can adopt for general web site design and data dashboards. Dark mode is the thing these days (Grafana) but you'll see why that's not ideal and usually these safety critical HMIs use a medium tone gray background. Totally different approach, from the bottom up. Esthetics is literally the last thing they worry about if at all.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/High-Performance-HMI-Handbook/dp/0977...

This is the pinnacle of human interface guidelines. Recent ones focus way to much on pleasure and joy brought on by superfluous, disorienting animations while totally disregarding getting work done or understanding how an app organizes its cognitive models.

I can spend hours looking at this. Beautiful.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com