Marielle's little place on the web

On iconic logo designers, a great website by the designer David Airey with a collection of logo designers, I found the following multicolumn list:

continue reading…

On which side of the road should we drive? Although I probably could make up an argument for either side based on the asymmetry of the brain’s hemispheres, this would be little convincing. Driving on the right is not safer (or less safe) than driving on the left. But it is pretty obvious that randomly assigning roads a ‘drive left’ or ‘drive right’ sign would lead to extremely dangerous situations, with frustrated drivers, accidents and confusion.

For many design choices in software applications there is no clear best option. The best thing to do in such a case is to aim for consistency (both internal consistency, within the application, and external consistency, with other applications in the typical usage environment). In this respect, human interface guidelines have great value and following guidelines results in applications consistent with your user’s expectations.

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)