It seems like we’re just being anal about something insignificant.
I’m no standardista. I’m a realist. You cannot have 100%. You’re lucky if you even get 70%. Nonetheless, we strive for quality for the optimal user experience, for the greatest system performance and reliability, for the best outcome for the business and thus the business’ clients and customers. That’s not being petty. That’s not about defending our roles or ego.
If every McDonalds store had a different logo, a different style, a different menu you would be less likely to visit a McDonalds store. The beauty of the franchise is the consistency. You know what to expect. You see the golden arches and you know Cheeseburger, $1.95. Drinks: Small, Regular and Large. Hash browns, pancakes, Big Mac and so on. You know how it works, you know the questions you’ll be asked and the payment options, where to stand to wait for your order, where to look for serviettes, where to dump your kids.
If every McDonalds store was branded differently you would be unsure about all these things. You might have to re-read the menu, remember new pricing, learn a new style of restaurant layout. If you didn’t know what to expect then suddenly McDonalds doesn’t seem such an attractive option over adjacent restaurants. It’s just another store.
This is why user interface designers, usability experts and user experience designers jump up and down about consistency and why misalignment of elements on a screen can sometimes rate higher than a mere “cosmetic” defect.
“According to the principle of consistency, systems are more usable and learnable when similar parts are expressed in similar ways. Consistency enables people to efficiently transfer knowledge to new contexts, learn new things quickly, and focus attention on the relevant aspects of a task“.
Lidwell, Holden, Butler. (2003) Universal Principles of Design. Rockport Publishers.
If you make a widget that behaves in a certain way, expects certain input from the user and is for a certain purpose then make that widget appear similar wherever it is used in a website or application. That way a user recognises the widget and recalls all those behaviours rather than starting from scratch with “So, what does this thing do?”. It’s not always practical to explicitly spell out and expose the internal workings of screen elements due to real estate and in the interests of minimalist design: you don’t want your screen overlaid with an essay on the interaction logic behind the screen; just enough instructional text to get them by without confusion or uncertainty (Is my private information really safe with you?) but from then maybe they won’t even need to read the tips and labels; they’ll know what to do.
But the worst thing you can do is trip people up when they think they recognise something, it invokes a schema and then … there’s just something not quite right. Something is different from the last widget that looked like this … what is it? Something different happened, it wasn’t what I expected, not what I was led to believe. Now you’re betraying them, undermining their confidence. It’d would be better if you had presented that widget as completely new, something to be learned from scratch.
So we’re not being anal, this stuff is really quite important. Minor discrepancies in similarity between the same classes of interactions can be worse than if you presents the same class of interaction differently across a site or application.
Which is why style guides are important, not to mention employing competent CSS and JavaScript front-end developers, who can only do their job properly with consistent, well-structured HTML.
// purecaffeine.com, UX, design, social media and Gov 2.0 blog by designer Nathanael Boehm, Canberra, Australia. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.
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Very well explained. I’m sometimes called “annoyingly thorough” but I consider this a compliment. It means I’m not only doing my job correctly, but also that I’m making everything easier for myself and anyone who works with me (or who will pick up the projects I do after I’m no longer working on them).
That said, one piece of your post deserves a special call-out:
This is totally true, but it’s also the defining factor between a competent usability expert and a bad one. The good ones know which inconsistencies are worth jumping up and down about, and which aren’t. The reality is, 100% consistency is worth striving for, but it’s not worth expecting 100% of the time.
Anyway, earlier today, I just finished the first draft of the technical angle of this very issue. I think my second draft will now include a link to this post.