Windows Vista User Interface Guidelines Updated

  • Article

Developing for Windows Vista?  The User Interface guidelines have been recently updated:

Windows Vista User Experience Guidelines

The goals for the official Windows Vista™ User Experience Guidelines (or "UX Guide" for short) are to:

  • Establish a high quality and consistency baseline for all Windows Vista-based applications.
  • Answer your specific user experience questions.
  • Make your job easier!

Getting started with Windows Vista

If you are new to Windows Vista:

  1. Start by checking What's New in Windows Vista. These articles summarize the new Windows Vista core UI features that you should use in your Windows Vista UI designs, and how they differ from Windows XP.
  2. Next, proceed to the Top Rules, which summarizes the top rules that the Windows Vista Design team suggests you follow to create high-quality, consistent Windows Vista UIs.
  3. Check out the Top Guidelines Violations, which summarizes the most common violations that the Windows Vista Design team is finding during design reviews, and offers guidelines for avoiding these violations.
  4. Finally, read Designing with Windows Presentation Foundation, which gives you an overview of how to take advantage of Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF, codename "Avalon").

What's new

The following new guidelines have been published since our December 2006 update:

UX Guide is now downloadable and printable!

By popular demand, we now have UX Guide in PDF format.