Communicating With Other Environments (HI Guide)

Inside Macintosh: Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines / Part 1 - Fundamentals: Chapter 2 - General Design Considerations / Collaborative Computing

Communicating With Other Environments

In collaborative communications, users may be interacting with other kinds of computers and computing environments. In most cases, these environments have human-computer interfaces very different from that of the Macintosh computer, and they may operate in vastly different ways. To whatever extent possible, Macintosh software should operate according to the user interface guidelines and should be consistent with other Macintosh applications.

When people working on different kinds of computers or in different computing environments communicate with one another, be aware that messages may lose a lot of their contextual clues. For example, if the person on the receiving end does not have the fonts that the sender has, the message sent may appear quite different than anticipated. As much as possible, try to preserve the integrity of communication in order that messages seen by collaborators are as similar as possible. If you know that some data will be lost when it migrates from one system to another, notify the user on the receiving end.