UX Glossary · H
Human Interface Guidelines
Also: HIG
Apple's platform design documentation, defining the conventions expected of apps on its operating systems.
The Human Interface Guidelines are Apple’s published design documentation, covering navigation patterns, standard controls, typography, layout, motion and accessibility across iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS and visionOS.
Apple has published them since 1987, when the original edition for the Macintosh set out principles that shaped desktop interface design broadly.
Why they carry more weight than most guidelines
Partly App Store review, which enforces some of them. Mostly Jakob’s Law: users have learned these conventions from every other app on the device, and an app that breaks them spends the user’s attention without giving anything back.
The conventions worth following closely are the ones carrying habit: navigation structure, the back gesture, system controls such as pickers and share sheets, and Dynamic Type, which respects the text size a user has deliberately chosen.
HIG and Material
Google’s Material Design is the equivalent for Android, and the two differ in more than styling: navigation models, the presence of a system back control, and elevation semantics.
The practical difference is that Material is also a complete implementable system with components and tokens, where the HIG is closer to documentation of platform behaviour.
In practice
For cross-platform work, share the information architecture and content, and keep navigation and system controls native to each platform. That is where users notice, and where the cost of being different is highest.