Designing for macOS

Display.

Ergonomics.

Inputs.

App interactions.

System features.

Best practices

  • Leverage large displays to present more content in fewer nested levels and with less need for modality, while maintaining a comfortable information density that doesn’t make people strain to view the content they want.

  • Let people resize, hide, show, and move your windows to fit their work style and device configuration, and support full-screen mode to offer a distraction-free context.

  • Use the menu bar to give people easy access to all the commands they need to do things in your app.

  • Help people take advantage of high-precision input modes to perform pixel-perfect selections and edits.

  • Handle keyboard shortcuts to help people accelerate actions and use keyboard-only work styles.

  • Support personalization, letting people customize toolbars, configure windows to display the views they use most, and choose the colors and fonts they want to see in the interface.


For the complete guidance, including worked examples and illustrations, see the canonical page: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/designing-for-macos

Apple HIG text and imagery are © Apple Inc. This page is a structured index of Apple’s canonical documentation (snapshot 2025-02-02), provided for quick reference and AI-agent consumption — it isn’t affiliated with or endorsed by Apple. Read the original at developer.apple.com (opens in new tab).

Get HIG guidance in your AI

Install HIG Doctor and get expert Apple design guidance directly in Claude Code.

npx skills add raintree-technology/hig-doctor
Email updates aren't configured on this deployment yet. Follow the GitHub repo (opens in new tab) for updates.