Platform guidelines: Apple HIG¶

Exercise apple-hig-annex.pdf · PDF

Today you dragged a file into a bin. You opened an Edit menu and found Undo, Cut, Copy and Paste, in that order, in an app you had never used before. Nobody taught you that app by app. Somebody wrote those rules down once, in a thin book, in 1987. You have been following it ever since, on computers its authors never saw.

Why should you care? Because the app you build this year will run on someone else's platform, and that platform has rules. The best way to understand them is to read the first rulebook: it is short, it explains its reasons, and almost every line of it is still true.

Every platform has its own driving rules¶

Think about driving. In Spain you drive on the right. In the UK you drive on the left. Neither is "wrong": both countries work fine, because everyone in the country follows the same rules. The disaster happens when one driver brings their home rules abroad.

Apps work the same way. The platform (iOS, Android, macOS, Windows...) is the country. Your app is the car. The guidelines are the country's highway code.

Platform interface guidelines are the official rules a platform's maker publishes so that every app on it looks and behaves in a familiar, predictable way.

When every app follows the same code, people learn it once and then use every app without thinking. That is the consistency you met with Nielsen's heuristics on the previous page, applied to a whole platform.

The first highway code¶

In the 1970s, using a computer meant typing. You memorised commands and wrote them on a black screen, one line at a time. That is a command-line interface: nothing on the screen tells you what you can do. You either remember the command or you are stuck.

Apple wanted computers for people who were not programmers. Getting there took ten years:

flowchart LR
    A["<b>1978</b><br>first guidelines<br>for the Apple II"] --> B["<b>1983 · Lisa</b><br>menu bar, mouse,<br>trash can"]
    B --> C["<b>1984 · Macintosh</b><br>the same ideas<br>on a cheaper machine"]
    C --> D["<b>1985</b><br>a chapter in<br>Inside Macintosh"]
    D --> E["<b>1987</b><br>the book:<br>ten principles"]

• 1978. Steve Jobs sees a program written by Bruce Tognazzini and has him hired in June as Apple's first applications software engineer. In September, Tognazzini publishes the first edition of Apple's human interface guidelines, for the Apple II. He stays 14 years and writes eight editions.
• 1983, the Lisa. Apple's first computer with a mouse. According to the 1987 book, the Lisa introduced the menu bar, the one-button mouse, dialog boxes, the Clipboard and the trash can. It built on research from the 1960s at SRI (where the mouse was born) and from the early 1970s at Xerox PARC (overlapping windows and icons).
• 1984, the Macintosh. The same ideas on a less expensive machine.
• 1985. The rules for Macintosh apps are a chapter, "User Interface Guidelines", inside the programmers' manual Inside Macintosh.
• 1987. The chapter becomes its own book: Human Interface Guidelines: The Apple Desktop Interface (Addison-Wesley). It covers "all computers in the Apple II and Macintosh product lines" and it is signed by two teams: the Human Interface Group and the Technical Publications Group.

The Apple Desktop Interface is the name the 1987 book gives to the whole system it describes: a desktop with windows, icons, menus and a pointer.

The book has three chapters: Philosophy (why), Elements of the Desktop Interface (what: windows, menus, the pointer, colour, sound) and Specifications (exactly how each one behaves). The whole book is in Resources (a scan from the Internet Archive).

The foreword puts design in its place: "Human interface design should come first, not last." And the first chapter explains who the rules are for:

"People aren't trying to use computers — they're trying to get their jobs done."

The ten principles of 1987¶

Chapter 1 lists "the ten fundamental principles of the Apple Desktop Interface". They are the spirit of the highway code: the reasons behind the signs. The middle column is quoted from the book.

Four of these are worth a closer look, because the words are new.

Metaphor. A metaphor here is an everyday object borrowed to explain a computer one. You have never seen a "directory", but you know what a folder is. The book warns that the trick has a limit: the metaphor "need not be taken to its logical extremes", and "photographic realism isn't essential".

Direct manipulation and see-and-point. Direct manipulation means you act on the thing itself, on the screen, and watch it react. See-and-point means the options are visible and you choose one. The book's order is "noun-then-verb": first select the object (this file), then the action (delete). It also keeps the fast lane open: a keyboard shortcut is "an alternative to the see-and-point approach — not a substitute for it".

WYSIWYG stands for "what you see is what you get". The book even tells you how to say it: wizzy-wig.

Perceived stability. People need landmarks. The menu bar stays at the top. Commands stay in their place. On a road, a sign that moves every night is worse than no sign.

You have seen these before¶

Read the book's explanation of see-and-point: "Users rely on recognition, not recall; they shouldn't have to remember anything the computer already knows."

Sound familiar? It is Nielsen's heuristic 6, recognition rather than recall. But this book is from 1987. Nielsen and Molich published their list in 1990, and the ten heuristics you learned are from 1994.

Two lists, written by different people, landing on the same ideas. That is not a coincidence, and nobody copied anybody's homework. Good design rules keep being rediscovered because they describe people, and people's brains do not change between companies.

The rule hiding in chapter one: modes¶

After the ten principles, the same chapter adds a rule for programmers. It is called modelessness:

A mode is a state in which the same action does something different from what it normally does.

You know one. Press Caps Lock by accident and type your password: same keys, different letters, "wrong password". You were in a mode and did not notice.

The book's rule: "With few exceptions, a given action on the user's part should always have the same result". Its reason: people do not "operate modally in real life", so modes make computers feel "unnatural and unfriendly".

Modes are not banned. A paint app where you pick the pencil, then the eraser, is fine, because real drawing tools work like that. But the book sets conditions:

And one rule with no exceptions: "No mode should ever prevent a user from saving a document or quitting the application."

The HIG today, in one minute¶

The highway code has been updated many times since. The current edition is not a book but a website: developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines. It covers every Apple device, and since June 2026 it lists eight design principles: purpose, agency, responsibility, familiarity, flexibility, simplicity, craft and delight.

Read them next to the 1987 list and you will recognise the family. Agency asks you to help people "recover from mistakes": that is forgiveness. Familiarity asks for consistency and feedback.

Two words you will meet in tutorials about the years in between:

• Skeuomorphism: making digital things imitate real objects, down to fake leather, paper and wood. It is the 1987 metaphor taken to the extreme the book warned about. Apple dropped it with iOS 7 in 2013.
• Liquid Glass: the translucent material Apple introduced in June 2025 for controls and navigation, which float on their own layer above the content.

Apple is not the only country with a highway code. Google's is Material Design, announced in 2014. Same destination, different signs:

A point and a dp do the same job: each stays about the same physical size on any screen, whatever its number of pixels. And look at the touch-target row: two companies landed on almost the same number, because a human fingertip is the same size on both platforms.

Key takeaways¶

• Platform interface guidelines are the platform's highway code: follow them and people use your app without having to learn it.
• Apple's guidelines start in 1978 with Bruce Tognazzini and the Apple II; the 1987 book Human Interface Guidelines: The Apple Desktop Interface is the first one for the desktop you still use.
• Its ten principles: metaphors, direct manipulation, see-and-point, consistency, WYSIWYG, user control, feedback and dialog, forgiveness, perceived stability and aesthetic integrity.
• Several of them match Nielsen's heuristics, published years later: good rules describe people, so they get rediscovered.
• A mode makes the same action do different things. Avoid modes, or make them visible and easy to leave.
• Today's HIG is a website with eight principles, and Material Design is Google's equivalent: keep your brand, but follow each platform's rules.

Quick check¶

Now you know the highway code and where it came from. But some drivers can't see the signs, or can't use a steering wheel. The 1987 book already had a section called "Designing for disabled people". Next: Accessibility, where WCAG 2.2 and EN 301 549 make sure your app works for everyone.