The New KDE HIG

Improving the User Experience

Photo by Andras Vas on Unsplash

Photo by Andras Vas on Unsplash

Author(s):

The KDE Human Interface Guidelines aim to help developers improve the user experience across a variety of aspects, and revisions are underway.

The KDE Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) first appeared near the end of the first decade of the millennium. It was a time when the Linux desktops had caught up with their proprietary counterparts but had paid little attention to the user experience. In 2008, at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention, Mark Shuttleworth challenged developers to “shoot beyond the Mac,” and “to figure out how to deliver something which is crisp and clean.” In response, over the next few years, Ubuntu, Gnome, and KDE experimented with rethinking the desktop, with varying degrees of success and mixed user response. Since then, distributions such as elementary OS, Deepin, Zorin, and Pop!_OS have conducted their own experiments, but KDE’s HIG have been little changed. However, in 2024, KDE developer Nate Graham has started a much-needed update.

The revised KDE HIG are still a work in progress, but the draft is a glimpse into an aspect of software development that users rarely consider (Figure 1). Many of the HIG are practical, such as suggestions about where and how to use icons, how to space navigation aids, and when to use different input tools such as sliders and text fields. More generally, under “What Makes a KDE App a KDE App?,” the revised HIG highlight the characteristics of guidance for novices, customizability for a variety of uses and needs, and constant evolution – a description that seems a good answer to the question of why users might want to try KDE.

Recently, Graham talked to Linux Magazine about some of the larger issues surrounding the KDE HIG:

[...]

Use Express-Checkout link below to read the full article (PDF).

Buy Linux Magazine

SINGLE ISSUES
 
SUBSCRIPTIONS
 
TABLET & SMARTPHONE APPS
Get it on Google Play

US / Canada

Get it on Google Play

UK / Australia

Related content

  • KDE Human Interface Guidelines

    The KDE Human Interface Guidelines aim to help developers improve the user experience across a variety of use cases, and revisions are underway.

  • Fedora Jumps into the Trademark Guidelines Ring

    Where Fedora is, so do they stand: shortly after openSUSE announced its own trademark guidelines, Fedora is coming up with its own variation.

  • Welcome

    The big search engines have way too much power over the business world. It almost doesn't matter what your business is. Almost every industry has some kind of online presence – either to sell directly or to provide information to users in need of addresses and product details.

  • News

    Updates on Technologies, Trends, and Tools

  • Welcome

    How long have we been told that cybersecurity starts with the programmer? And what does that mean exactly? What can we do about it?

comments powered by Disqus
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters

Support Our Work

Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.

Learn More

News