Legacy Maemo 5 Documentation/Human Interface Guidelines/Introduction

=Introduction= This topic presents a series of guidelines to help you create Hildon applications that provide a good user experience. The principles and advices covered here are intended to help interface designers, software developers and graphic artists to create well-designed and intuitive tools fully adapted to mobile devices, considering their capabilities and limitations.

Following these guidelines, your work will result in an application which is attractive and simple to use. Also, you can expect that:


 * Users will learn to use your application faster, because interface elements will look and behave the way they are used to.
 * Novice and advanced users will be able accomplish tasks quickly and easily, because the interface won't be confusing or make things difficult.
 * Your application will continue to look good when users change color themes, fonts and languages.
 * Your application will be designed with usability in mind, specially adapted to mobile devices with a limited screen and input methods.

To help you achieve these goals, these guidelines will cover the basic interface elements, how to use them together effectively, and how to integrate well with the specificities of mobile devices.

Since the GNOME plaform forms the basis of Hildon, this document is based on the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines. They have been adapted for developing software for a mobile platform. Some sections of the GNOME HIG will be referenced and linked directly, since they are particularly relevant. We also recommend readong the GNOME HIG entirely, as it contains a lot of generally useful interface design advice.