Regarding Consistency...
In response to a well-thought-out post by Russell Wilson on the IxD discussion board, I responded with my take on enforcing consistency in homogenous user experiences (e.g. our company's intranet portal users - primarily employees from different business units with similar expectations of the service)...enjoy =]
I agree with your overall tenet that consistency is not the be-all and end-all arbiter of design decisions. Creativity is equally important to the experience and occasionally unique circumstances require varying from the norm (consistency) and/or completely reinventing the wheel.
On the other hand, the Wheel example in your post illustrates the boundary between consistency and creativity quite well. You're right, neither bicycles, motorcycles, vans nor sport cars should have the same wheel design - but they're all round, have a hole in the middle, are sized according to their load and treaded according to their anticipated use.
In our last portal redesign, we determined that consistency was the number one problem with our interface, in two veins:
In our redesign, we implemented a principle called "Interface consistency with content creativity". We normalized all links, menus, buttons and typefaces to one font style and behavior (blue underlined links, etc). At the same time, we added 20-odd slightly different "themes" tied to business units, to give people more visual cues to understand where they were in the 500+ community portal. We relaxed some standards around images and clip-art (ugh), let users be a little more creative in their communications, and the resulting portal is much more "friendly, social and usable" than before (taken from recent surveys).
The statement above, "Interface Consistency, Content Creativity" really helped us clear the cobwebs of what we (as the UCD team) meant by consistency. When communicators & business folks understood we weren't trying to change the way they communicate, they bought into the concept much more quickly. In fact, I'd say part of our job was to empower communicators by reducing variance in general site behavior, in favor of highlighting the true content that every portal visitor needed to know.
The lesson learned from our previous portal? Creativity is a necessary part of designing an interactive, friendly experience. Inconsistency for *purely arbitrary reasons* (i.e. because the designer wanted to be different) achieves the opposite of the site's intended effect - it shifts people's focus from the content or task to questions like "Why the hell is that button shaped like a wagon?"
I don't know if I'm agreeing with Russel's post or not, but definitely appreciate the discussion. It's important and worthwhile having with any development group who questions the relevance of Section 508, W3C, or corporate web standards.
I agree with your overall tenet that consistency is not the be-all and end-all arbiter of design decisions. Creativity is equally important to the experience and occasionally unique circumstances require varying from the norm (consistency) and/or completely reinventing the wheel.
On the other hand, the Wheel example in your post illustrates the boundary between consistency and creativity quite well. You're right, neither bicycles, motorcycles, vans nor sport cars should have the same wheel design - but they're all round, have a hole in the middle, are sized according to their load and treaded according to their anticipated use.
In our last portal redesign, we determined that consistency was the number one problem with our interface, in two veins:
- The overall experience was TOO uniform and looked the same everywhere you went, and
- Behavior elements like buttons, links, menus and body content were completely different on just about every page, and frequently several times within the same page.
In our redesign, we implemented a principle called "Interface consistency with content creativity". We normalized all links, menus, buttons and typefaces to one font style and behavior (blue underlined links, etc). At the same time, we added 20-odd slightly different "themes" tied to business units, to give people more visual cues to understand where they were in the 500+ community portal. We relaxed some standards around images and clip-art (ugh), let users be a little more creative in their communications, and the resulting portal is much more "friendly, social and usable" than before (taken from recent surveys).
The statement above, "Interface Consistency, Content Creativity" really helped us clear the cobwebs of what we (as the UCD team) meant by consistency. When communicators & business folks understood we weren't trying to change the way they communicate, they bought into the concept much more quickly. In fact, I'd say part of our job was to empower communicators by reducing variance in general site behavior, in favor of highlighting the true content that every portal visitor needed to know.
The lesson learned from our previous portal? Creativity is a necessary part of designing an interactive, friendly experience. Inconsistency for *purely arbitrary reasons* (i.e. because the designer wanted to be different) achieves the opposite of the site's intended effect - it shifts people's focus from the content or task to questions like "Why the hell is that button shaped like a wagon?"
I don't know if I'm agreeing with Russel's post or not, but definitely appreciate the discussion. It's important and worthwhile having with any development group who questions the relevance of Section 508, W3C, or corporate web standards.
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