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Legacy Maemo 5 Documentation/Human Interface Guidelines/Introduction

This article is legacy documentation, and is superseded by Forum Nokia documentation. The Forum Nokia documentation is available as the Hildon 2.2 UI style guide, Fremantle master layout guide and the Hildon 2.2 widget UI specification

Partial Copyright © 2002-2008 Calum Benson, Adam Elman, Seth Nickell, colin z robertson

This document presents a series of guidelines to help you create Hildon applications that provide the user with a good 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 learn to use your application faster, because interface elements look and behave the way the users are used to.
• Novice and advanced users alike will be able to accomplish tasks quickly and easily, because the interface will not be confusing or make things difficult.
• Your application continues to look good when users change color themes, fonts and languages.
• Your application is usable, especially adapted to mobile devices with a limited screen and input methods.

To help you achieve these goals, these guidelines cover the basic user interface elements, how to use them together effectively, how to make your application integrate well in mobile devices, and the important differences you should consider between mobile and traditional environments.

Because GNOME is the basis of Hildon, this document is based on GNOME Human Interface Guidelines. The guidelines are adapted for the development of software for a mobile platform. Some sections of the GNOME HIG are referenced and linked directly, because they are particularly relevant, but also read the GNOME HIG, because it contains a lot of generally useful interface design advice.