Design Principles

The tauOS Human Interface Guidelines are driven by innovation, and people. As a designer or developer you are encouraged to use these guidelines as a set of ideals to fit in with the tauOS platform. Feel free to break rules sometimes, making beautiful, powerful apps should be your priority.

Human Centered

Design in tauOS is human centric, we strive to create a platform for everyone, everywhere to create. To do so we must provide accommodations for different cultures, abilities, and levels of knowledge. Our apps are designed to be immediately understandable. This is the central ideal of tauOS design and drives all of our guidelines.

Simple By Design

A good app does few things pretty well, a great app does one thing better than the rest. Before you start making an app, put some thought into what it needs to be, not solely in functionality but also how it's used, and how it fits into people's lives.

You should try to stick to these 3 ideals:

• Resist the allure of adding functions upon functions. Focus on one set of functions that serves the primary goal.
• Don't clutter the interface with too many elements at once. Gradually unveil your app's interface by context.
• Frequently used actions should be accessible within a few interactions, while ones used less frequently may take more.

Focused & Effortless

As a developer or designer, you should never obstruct the user. This means anticipating the way a user will interact with your app in their everyday. This set of principles should assist in keeping the user in charge:

• If it can be done automatically, automate it.
• Present the most used actions over lesser used ones.
• Don't have hundreds of actions - an app is a tool, not a pet project.
• Give out information as needed, preferably in byte-sized chunks.
• Keep text short - every word removed is a symphony to the reader.

Anticipate Mistakes

Humans make mistakes, as a developer your app shouldn't punish them for making one. Your app should:

• Explain all destructive actions before the user can confirm it.
• Be clear, avoid ambiguity.