Today I found some time to look at the Apple Human Interface Guidelines for Mac OS X. Microsoft’s latest guidelines are the Windows Vista User Experience Guidelines (still “preliminary documentation” though).
A few thoughts:
- The Vista guidelines are quite technology-driven sometimes, top rule number one is “Use the Aero Theme and System Font (Segoe UI)”
- Apple places more emphasis on the design process and stresses involving your users in early stage development and
- The Apple guidelines are clearer and easier to work with
- I really hope the final version of the Vista guidelines will be better
On first impression, Apple clearly wins. (And I’m not even a Mac user)
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