How should I design an iPad app using Apple's HIG?

Apple's HIG recommends using sidebars instead of bottom tab bars on iPadOS, supporting split views for multitasking, and adding pointer interactions. Apple HIG Skills provides instant, AI-ready guidance on all iPadOS conventions.

What are Apple's guidelines for adding Apple Pay?

Apple's HIG specifies exact payment button placement, flow design, error states, and UX patterns required for App Store approval. Apple HIG Skills gives your AI agent access to the full Apple Pay design guidelines.

How do I make my Apple app accessible?

Apple's HIG requires support for VoiceOver, Dynamic Type, sufficient color contrast ratios, and motor accessibility features like Switch Control. Apple HIG Skills covers all accessibility foundations and requirements.

How do I design for visionOS and Apple Vision Pro?

Apple's HIG for visionOS covers ornaments, volumes, immersive spaces, eye tracking, and spatial interaction patterns. Apple HIG Skills includes dedicated visionOS platform guidance and spatial layout references.

What are Apple's dark mode design guidelines?

Apple's HIG specifies using system semantic colors, material backgrounds, elevated surfaces, and vibrancy for dark mode. Apps should test in both modes and avoid hard-coded color values. Apple HIG Skills covers the full dark mode specification.

How should I design notifications for iOS apps?

Apple's HIG covers notification grouping, Live Activities, action buttons, and respecting user attention. Apple HIG Skills provides guidelines for the full notification system including widgets and complications.

Tab views

A tab view presents multiple mutually exclusive panes of content in the same area, which people can switch between using a tabbed control.

A stylized representation of a view with two labeled tabs, the first of which is selected. The image is tinted red to subtly reflect the red in the original six-color Apple logo.

Best practices

Use a tab view to present closely related areas of content. The appearance of a tab view provides a strong visual indication of enclosure. People expect each tab to display content that is in some way similar or related to the content in the other tabs.

Make sure the controls within a pane affect content only in the same pane. Panes are mutually exclusive, so ensure they’re fully self-contained.

Provide a label for each tab that describes the contents of its pane. A good label helps people predict the contents of a pane before clicking or tapping its tab. In general, use nouns or short noun phrases for tab labels. A verb or short verb phrase may make sense in some contexts. Use title-style capitalization for tab labels.

Avoid using a pop-up button to switch between tabs. A tabbed control is efficient because it requires a single click or tap to make a selection, whereas a pop-up button requires two. A tabbed control also presents all choices onscreen at the same time, whereas people must click a pop-up button to see its choices. Note that a pop-up button can be a reasonable alternative in cases where there are too many panes of content to reasonably display with tabs.

Avoid providing more than six tabs in a tab view. Having more than six tabs can be overwhelming and create layout issues. If you need to present six or more tabs, consider another way to implement the interface. For example, you could instead present each tab as a view option in a pop-up button menu.

For developer guidance, see NSTabView.

Anatomy

The tabbed control appears on the top edge of the content area. You can choose to hide the control, which is appropriate for an app that switches between panes programmatically.

An illustration of a window in which a three-tab tabbed control is centered on the top edge of the content view.

When you hide the tabbed control, the content area can be borderless, bezeled, or bordered with a line. A borderless view can be solid or transparent.

In general, inset a tab view by leaving a margin of window-body area on all sides of a tab view. This layout looks clean and leaves room for additional controls that aren’t directly related to the contents of the tab view. You can extend a tab view to meet the window edges, but this layout is unusual.

Tab views

Tab views

Best practices

Anatomy

Platform considerations

iOS, iPadOS

watchOS

Resources

Developer documentation

Change log

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