Share via


The User Interface Guidelines for Microsoft Windows

How Do IDetailsFAQ

Most first-class applications for the Microsoft Windows operating system share a familiar and consistent user interface. This improves the usability of the application because the user is not forced to relearn common operations. For example, a user who regularly prints documents from Microsoft Word intuitively looks for a Print option on the File menu when confronted with the task of printing in an unfamiliar application.

Microsoft suggests guidelines that help you use the standard Windows user interface objects and environment in a consistent manner. The book The Windows Interface: An Application Design Guide is available from Microsoft Press; it contains a chapter on overall principles and methodology along with specific guidelines for keyboard input, windows, menus, and so on.

The Microsoft Foundation Class Library (MFC), and especially the skeleton applications created with AppWizard, provide a good starting point to develop an application that conforms to the published guidelines. These tools ease the process of developing an application that has the “look and feel” expected by experienced users of the Windows environment.

MFC was designed to support the published user interface guidelines. Overriding the default behavior in derived classes tends to be more difficult than working with the default behavior of MFC. Adding to the default behavior is relatively simple.