Why UI Guidelines Are Important
What Are UI Guidelines?
UI guidelines explain the best practices of UI components and understanding of their behavior by giving real examples.
These guidelines are usually defined at the organizational level and equally helpful for designers, developers, and testers.
Why UI Guidelines Are Important?
The user interface is easy to make a mess out of. You can start a project with one style and end with another. It doesn’t matter if you are a guru or just dabbling, inconsistencies in the design will most probably arise. To solve this problem you can establish a set of UI guidelines.
UI guidelines are used to enforce consistent experience throughout your products. It also saves you time because designers don’t have to create specs each time they design a feature, and it can be updated date based on new standards and trends, and update your designs over time.
Types of UI Guidelines
Based on their usage, Guidelines can be categorized as the following.
Style
Style guidelines define the visual expression of an organization that it presents to the world. Every organization has its own style guide which they use to build logos, colors, icons & typography.
Layout
Layout guidelines define the overall structure of the interface. UI can be designed using grid layout or list layout. This section of guidelines also contains the layout of responsive design.
UI Components
These guidelines provide specs and usage of UI components that display on the interface and a user interacts with them. UI components include standard controls like input controls, windows, dialogs, panels, menus, views, scrollbars, buttons, etc.
Text
Textual guidelines cover the tone and style of text to be used on UI. The text should be understandable for different cultures and audiences. Text specs like font size, color, and style are part of these guidelines.
Interaction And Behavior
Types of interaction (click, gesture, voice) that a user performs with a design, and system response in return to these interactions are part of these guidelines.
Accessibility
Designing an accessible system requires a specific set of guidelines for different types of disabled users so they may use the product.
Patterns
Reusable design patterns are included in UI guidelines. These patterns define behavior for certain controls. For example navigation, search, forms, data formats, states, and pagination.
Resources
Guidelines have a collection of resources that can be used while designing a system. These resources contain layout templates for multiple devices, icon sets, font libraries, UI components, and color palettes.
UI Guideline Examples
Apple
Apple emphasizes user experience over other things and provides very innovative designs. Apple has published its design guidelines for all types of products on its website.
- Desktop design guidelines are helpful for designing applications for Mac system.
- To design iOS apps, Apple provides a collection of Mobile design guidelines.
- In addition, the UI guidline for Wearable devices (WatchOS) are available on Apple’s site.
Google delivers a visual language for its users that defines principles of innovative design.
- Material design covers guidelines for both desktop web apps as well as Android apps.
- Google UI guidelines for WearOS, Augmented Reality Design, and Android Auto are available on its website.
Final Thoughts
UI guidelines are common design concepts that are used to build engaging and unique user experiences. Following guidelines helps you to improve the usability and consistency of the design of your product.
