Comments on: Consistency in Design is the Wrong Approach

By: Of Global Consistency and Current Knowledge | Global by Design

Of Global Consistency and Current Knowledge | Global by Design — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 03:13:03 +0000

[...] usability consultant Jared Spool recently wrote about the difference between designing for “consistency” and designing for [...]

By: Johann Rosario

Johann Rosario — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 19:48:54 +0000

Thank you for this validating article. As a user interface designer I have never been more frustrated than when I’m sitting in a “Design by Committee” meeting and some well intentioned, but otherwise misinformed corporate hack comments that “the design should be consistent.”

Really, you think! Consistent with what, may I ask? Consistent for the sack of consistency? Consistent with sounding proper at a meeting when you really have no idea what your talking about?

Whenever someone says “Make it consistent” I usually break out in allergies, because in my experience consistency has been the bail of anything creative and the force that misdirects a design team.

Obviously certain things have to have a uniformity of structure, and a repeating theme in the design, but what they really are saying is, “at all cost, make it an easy project that wont be a problem later.”

It’s a cursed word because it usually has the opposite effect. It’s a word that save you from looking radical in a corporate meeting, (and we all know where that can lead to). It’s a word that fails to address the very fact that “consistency” often times can be equally apply to doing something consistently wrong.

Every company has a nebulous definition of consistency, even when we think we are saying the same thing. Perhaps the word should be banned!

By: Jared Spool

Jared Spool — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 16:00:03 +0000

Dave: We like to turn to personas when we’re faced with the “Which users should we design for” question. Personas take an umanagable mass and focus it on a few individuals with both overlapping and independent needs.

By: Jared Spool

Jared Spool — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 15:55:38 +0000

Patrick: What I was trying to say was that consistency isn’t bad, but is the wrong place to start when designing. When designers ask, “What should this be consistent with?”, they aren’t necessarily taking the users’ knowledge into account — thereby creating something that is consistent but unrecognizable.

The AVIS folks shot for internal consistency, however they didn’t take into account that many users would come with an already existing perception of what the asterisk meant — the opposite of the designer’s choice. The result: confusion *because* of the consistency.

Instead of focusing on consistency, the right place to start is “What do the users know?” If users are familiar with design elements, and you design for that familiarity, you’ll end up with a consistent interface. But, that’s really an accidental side effect of designing for current knowledge.

By: Patrick Moss

Patrick Moss — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 15:13:52 +0000

I’m a bit confused by this article. The headline is provocative, but the article doesn’t argue that consistency is a *bad* thing. Rather, it seems to state that being internally consistent is not sufficient for good design, if the design choices were poor. Is this the crux of the article? I’m not sure exactly how the Avis example makes sense in this context…it seems that if the Avis designers had elected to be ‘externally’ consistent (using asterisks) perhaps that would have been superior to creating their own standard and foisting it on users.

By: Dave Murray

Dave Murray — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 12:47:25 +0000

I am curious about a couple of items.
Car companies usually are thinking of their customer’s “curretn knowledge” in creating new design. While it adds sparkle to their line of products, it tends to narrow their customer base. Yet, underneath it, there seems this shadowy consistency: design by customer wants. But which customer?

Secondly, does this tend to exaccerabte the problem of constantly changing to meet the whims of customers, reinforcing an eclectic approach to life rather than attempting to build foundations? I’m not advocating a “stone age” approach to life (i.e. everything is in concrete and can never change). No, consistency provides a framework, an identity even a sanctuary. Some consistency, I think, it vital. Addressing customer needs and wants to important too and I support researching customer knowledge as a key means of delivering the product. But I also think some dynamic balance (i.e. a consistent concept applied upon customer knowledge) would be good, too. Example: pants; still fit over two legs but look at the pockets!

By: Couros Blog » Blog Archive » Forget Consistency. Think About The User First.

Sat, 17 Sep 2005 00:27:00 +0000

[...] Stephen Downes points to a great article that argues that designers often focus entirely too much on the consistency of design versus thinking about a users current knowledge. The problem with thinking in terms of consistency is that those thoughts focus purely on the design and the user can get lost. “Is what I’m designing consistent with other things we’ve designed (or others have designed)?” is the wrong question to ask. [...]