

The death of consistency in UI design - thomholwerda
http://www.osnews.com/story/26085/The_death_of_consistency_in_UI_design

======
TorbjornLunde
Repost from OSnews comments:

This philosophy of putting consistency on this giant pedestal reminds me of
the strict non-expressive philosophy of 60s modernist graphic design. They use
Helvetica for everything, because Helvetica is neutral, believe that type
should never be expressive because the meaning is in the content. Today many
like the _style_ , but very few share the philosophy that design should not be
expressive.

Today graphic design is expressive. You can look at a poster and guess the
content based on the typeface, colors, texture, etc. I think we are seeing a
similar development in the world of UI design. Having the notes app actually
sort-of look like handwritten notes gives people visual cues to what this
application and makes it easy to understand. I would not be surprised if such
visual cues makes the app disappear than a pure consistent app would. These
apps are only different visually, in behavior they are often very consistent.
You also have apps that take things much futher, such as Convertbot, Clear or
Paper. I think breaking UI conventions is completely acceptable _if they make
the experience better_. Personally I find Paper to be far more invisible than
the other more consistent sketching-apps for iPad.

I think there is more than enough room for both philosophies (and everything
between). Vote with your wallet and buy the apps that work well for you.

~~~
Produce
Allow me to explain to you why you're wrong.

My computer is _my_ computer. Not Apple's computer when I'm using iTunes (hah,
as if I'd ever use that piece of crap, but stay with me here), not Microsoft's
when I'm using Windows Media Player, not Google's when I'm using Chrome and
not Mozilla's when I'm using Thunderbird.

I know what I want my user interface to look like. I know what fonts, colours
and relative sizes I want things to be. All in exactly the same way that I
know what colour I want the walls to be painted in my home and where I want my
furniture.

By breaking UI conventions because some idiot thinks that he knows what
colours and shapes my monitor should display, I am unable to dictate what my
own things should look like. Instead of a designer spending his time on
designing a theme for a GUI toolkit and skinning all of the applications on my
computer at once, he wastes time on coming up with a visual theme for just one
of them.

Intelligence 101 - tend towards abstraction as much as possible. This recent
trend clearly has it's roots in the idiot depart... ahem, sorry, I mean
marketing department where the thinking went something like "but we need to
solidify our brand experience by making our application stand out!". Yeah,
buddy, yours and everybody elses. Give me my shit back, provide the
functionality I'm buying from you and design a nice theme for KDE or Windows
if you feel so inclined.

To hammer the point in further with another example, CSS was designed with,
err, designers in mind and look at what a head-fuck that turned out to be.
Leave the thinking to people who know how to think - we'll tell you what needs
prettying up and how to do it right.

To throw out an idea of how things could be better - why can't GUI toolkits
support fluid designs which can be manipulated by central themes? Why can't
some people opt for ribbon menus while others use the old drop down menus just
by changing a theme? What about if I want all my menus to be ribbon style but
in a vertical fashion? Or if I want that list of porn actresses names' to be
on the right rather than on the left of the porn database application I use to
track my stalking habits? GUI's should adapt to how the individual thinks as
opposed to the other way round as it currently is. _That_ is the smart way to
do it. This recent trend in UI's and, frankly, many other things, is taking
the stupid approach to the problem.

~~~
dubya
If you are that particular about your tools you should consider making them
yourself, or using software you can really claim ownership of. iTunes and
Chrome are not your software in any meaningful sense. Even less so probably
because they are free (gratis).

With Mozilla you might have a claim, and I assume you are free to make your
own version that has the columns in your preferred order or whatnot. For
official support you just have to convince a sufficient number of like-minded
programmers that yours is a problem worth solving, and then some minor
technical bits like "What determines the central theme?" and "What scripting
language shall we standardize on?"

~~~
Produce
If _my_ hardware (hard disk) has a particular configuration of bits stored on
it then they are _my_ bits. How can information stored on something I own not
be mine? I'm not talking in the legal sense here, I think that patents are
ridiculous, but in the common sense sense.

~~~
dubya
I can't tell if your original comment was more than a rant. In some sense you
own those bits, but not in a way that is useful to you. Starting with just the
bits, it's going to be a lot of work to make iTunes skinnable, and you likely
won't be able to distribute your changes legally.

It seems similar to ranting that Miles Davis has recorded all of these long
boring solos on _your_ CDs. You could spend your time editing them out, you
could demand an edited reissue from the publisher, you could just listen to
something else, or you could learn to play trumpet and record something you'd
rather listen to. The least useful option seems to be posting to HN.

------
abraxasz
I'd like to add a thought: maybe inconsistency in UI design is the only way to
experiment and actually improve the current state of design.

When Apple released its ipod (with the big wheel in the middle), it was
nothing like the other players we were used to. Was it horrible? Was I annoyed
by the difference? No, I thought it was cool, and I loved my iPod. Some years
later, they did the exact same thing with the iPhone. Completely different,
and yet, it set a new standard for design.

Now I understand the point of the article, and it's true that it's annoying to
see every other small app coming up with new UI conventions. But I guess I'm
not too radical about it: if this is the price to pay for innovation in UI
design, I'll take it.

~~~
potatolicious
Agreed - note some of the most enduring new UI conventions we've come to
expect in the last couple of years, all of which were pioneered by third-party
apps bucking the trend (even in places where there was already established
convention).

\- Pull down to refresh (where Apple encouraged an explicit refresh button on
the bottom of the screen)

\- Swipe aside views (where Apple encouraged explicit navigation buttons)

\- Slide aside menus (a la Path, where Apple expected tab bars to fulfill that
role)

\- Fan-out controls (a la Path, where Apple expected the use of drop downs)

The list goes on. I for one am happy that some people are unwilling to just
follow the tried and true.

------
mikeryan
Can't you make the argument that the web killed consistency in UI design a
long time ago?

The web has always been a completely blank slate from a UI perspective and
what happened was that defacto UI/UX "standards" continue to grow and evolve.
Someone will always try to do something completely different. But thats okay
it pushes the boundaries a bit. You'll still have a lot of apps that use the
consistent tried and true UX methods but some will flaunt these and push where
UI can go. Path and the Band Of The Day apps both do this beautifully. Both
are non-standard but very easy to navigate.

~~~
Kerrick
I think Twitter Bootstrap and Zurb Foundation are trying to bring some of that
consistency back into the Web. Even completely unique applications with their
own design and functionality are easy to navigate when they start with these
frameworks.

For example, Roll20 [<http://roll20.net/>], an online RPG tabletop, is a full-
featured web app that is easy to use even though it's quite complex, partly
because they worried about designing a custom UI on the macro scale, leaving
the micro scale (buttons, form elements, etc.) to Twitter Bootstrap.

~~~
mikeryan
I totally agree. The whole idea of responsive design that those types of
frameworks promote is exactly the type of defacto standards that arise out of
the mishmash of web UI/UX.

------
chris_wot
I think he is mourning a problem that needs no solution. Let me put it this
way: my wife, who has _very_ little understanding of how to operate computers
(to make capital letters, she uses capslock / letter / capslock), literally
figured out how to use her iPhone 4 within 4 minutes of turning it on.

If the problem with the UI is that it makes it harder to use, then I don't
think that consistency is the problem. Lest you believe that I have a sample
size of one, I have had my entire family use the iPhone, and they aren't
particularly computer/gadget savy. My father, for instance, uses his Nokia
"phone book" frequently, however that "phone book" is a taped on list of
numbers on the back of his mobile phone. And with a little prompting, he was
playing Angry Birds within about 10 minutes. My young daughter, 4 years old,
has worked out how to unlock the phone (to my chagrin) and plays "Peppa Pig"
at odd hours of the night.

If anything, the darned iPhone interface is _too_ easy to use!

------
dredmorbius
My "old school" of UI dates back to the 1980s, and through the mid 1990s.

To my eye, UI shows elements of program legacy. From Apple (early Mac) to PC
(DeskMate, Amiga, MS DOS), early Windows. On the Unix side, a proliferation of
X toolkits: Xt, Athena, Xaw, Motif, Tk, gtk, Qt.

For desktops, one of the beauties of X is the emulation modes of many window
managers -- if you prefer the look and feel of Windows 95, Amiga, BeOS, Motif,
CDE, VUE, old-style Mac, Mac Acqua, or any of several dozen other desktops,
it's possible to try them out easily. While not all of these emulate deep
characteristics of their source GUIs, there are at least some characteristics
which are available for review.

Even CLI/console tools show their legacy. Emacs draws from TOPS/ITS, mc from
DOS via Norton Commander, dd's odd command-line syntax will be familiar to
those who've used JCL. Even native Unix/Linux command sets draw from various
BSD (short options, single dash, single character) and GNU (long option,
double dash, word) formats. More recent commands with a weaker Unix philosophy
legacy use a single dash and even MixedCase words (ImageMagick, some disk
utilities).

While inconsistent among tools, the formats do give me a clue as to what the
legacy, and possible behavior, of these tools will be.

In the mobile space, minimized UIs are somewhat necessary. Interestingly,
several of these were pioneered on Linux (e.g.: Matchbox). This does not mean
that there's no room for exploration of useful UI metaphors in a new and
highly constrained form factor.

Of possible interest: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_widget_toolkits>

------
drcube
The thing I hate most about modern UIs is the lack of information. Instead of
buttons with text, it's just a whole bunch of mysterious icons. Give me at
least some idea of what will happen when I click your icon, and please try and
make it _look_ clickable, rather than some background glyphs. Oh, and mobile
OSes need to come up with some sort of analog for keyboard shortcuts.

Consistency is nice, but usability and discoverability are more important.

~~~
the_bear
Google seems to be worst with this. In addition to having confusing icons,
they're not even consistent with themselves. The Gmail archive icon on my
Android phone is a picture of a filing cabinet. The archive icon on their main
web app is a box with an arrow pointing down. They're two completely different
icons for the exact same action.

~~~
Evbn
They balance that by elsewhere using the same icon for completely different
actions, like the sealed envelope that means Compose as well as Mark Unread.

------
WiseWeasel
The author is focusing on the wrong details. As long as the workflows and
interface element positioning and shape are kept consistent, the visual theme
is of little consequence. As long as the back button is on the upper left of
your iOS app and has the right shape, it can have zebra stripes for all your
user cares.

------
Xion
I couldn't agree more with what this guy is saying.

But, mobile applications aren't actually the worst offenders here. At the very
least, both platforms have their guidelines for developers to follow if they
want to make their apps consistent with the rest of system. And I wouldn't be
so sure this is not important: snazzy looks might gain you more installs, but
UX that silently and subtly uses established patterns fits more firmly into
users' minds and may noticeably increase retention (and thus number of
positive reviews).

The bigger culprits in terms of violating UI consistency are, I think, web
applications. As far as I know, you don't even _have_ any definite guidelines
there to begin with, which is of course due to decentralized nature of the web
ecosystem. There are some effort that encourage consistency as a side effect
(Twitter Bootstrap comes to mind) but the decade-old habits of designing every
website completely from scratch do not seem to be dying anytime soon.

~~~
Evbn
But mobile OSes are constantly changing the guidelines. Every new phone has a
whole new UI language. Gingerbread, ICS, vendor mods, etc.

------
monkeyfacebag
"As a proponent of what is now called the old school of UI design"

Doesn't sound like a very old school to me. vi, emacs and a large portion of
popular command line tools came about in an era where devising one's own
interface and interface conventions was the _only_ route to actually providing
an interface. Desktop environments ameliorated this somewhat, but only for
common, generic tasks (copying, pasting, etc.). For any specialized or
application-specific tasks it's _always_ been roll-your-own, except that now
people are actually _thinking_ about the problem before creating the UI.

Consistency is important, but it's not the only factor.

------
marckremers
An article like this coming from a site that has not updated it's UI in what
looks like 6 or 7 years rings alarm bells for me. The UI of the blog is
literally looking like a sore thumb, my eyes almost jumped at how different
and compressed it looked.

I really disagree with this guys thoughts. When I'm in Twitter, I want it to
look like 'Twitter'. I want to know I'm in Instagram, or Facebook, and _see_
the difference. Imagine if all apps used the exact same UI solutions. How
would innovation happen? It just doesn't make sense on so many levels.
Diversity is a good thing.

------
JVIDEL
I remember when there was consistency in UI design: everything looked like
Windows95

~~~
jamesgeck0
Far more recently, everything looked like Gnome 2. It was nice because I could
launch an application I'd never used before and know how various elements
would behave.

* Certain shortcut keys would be consistent across applications

* Other shortcuts would be customizable by hovering over a menu item and pressing the shortcut keys.

* Listboxes could be filtered by typing and a little floating textbox would show what I'd typed.

* If I was in a dark room and was using a dark theme, I (probably) wouldn't suddenly have a bright white window blinding me.

* The file selector for opening/saving files would be standard.

* I'd be able to edit things on networked locations open in Nautilus.

And so on and so forth. There were all sorts of nice little touches that
everything would have just because it was a Gnome 2 application. Going back to
Windows XP, it always felt like everything was competing for my attention by
being different in assorted inconsistant ways.

~~~
grecy
One of my favorite things about Mac OS is the extremely consistent shortcut
keys across all apps.

------
ThomPete
I think this is missing an important point.

The consistency in Android and iPhone is the touch screen. By removing
abstraction, by a limited screen real-estate and thus limited scope of
applications, I don't believe this is an actual problem.

In fact one could say that because of the above, exploration and inconsistency
should be encouraged.

In the future apps wont be so much about on-screen interaction but rather
representing information based on automated real life interaction. (Lots of
automation the coming years)

The chrome will be all around you and not on the screen. Only the
object/content will be on the screen (and the many screens).

So sure apps are not UI consistent but neither is a hammer, a schrewdriver and
a ruler (i.e. apps)

------
jiggy2011
This is going to be a serious problem for the adoption of web apps. Current
problems with web apps are things like lack of keyboard shortcuts (without the
browser getting in the way). Browser chrome wasting space in the UI and an
overall more "laggy" feeling than a native app.

All of these problems however can (have?) be improved upon. UI consistency
will be the last great bastion however, whenever I use a web app I have to
spend a considerable amount of time figuring out where everything will be in
the UI, this is even true for things like gmail.

Perhaps there will become a defaco standard widget set for web apps?

~~~
joneil
The defacto-standard already seems to be happening with Twitter Bootstrap.
Give it another few years and I expect this will spread into more well-known
apps (or the current startups using it will become more prominent).

And I do think people are addressing the other issues. Chrome's Web-App API
can open pages in new windows without the browser UI, and Firefox is due to
have their similar API available soon.

Things like keyboard shortcuts will likely sort themselves out eventually: for
example, Github's issue tracking tries to mirror the keyboard shortcuts of
gmail wherever the actions are similar.

------
pbreit
Thank goodness the sentiment in this rant is not more widespread. The author
would prefer that app designers y to avoid from standing out? Good luck with
that. And really, is it that bad? Functional apps frequently make good use of
prevailing design. And consumer an entertainment apps absolutely should be
exploring. The form factor is so limited already that it's much harder to go
very far astray.

------
carsongross
I agree that consistency of UI is, broadly, an important part of general
usability, but I think that _the web_ has been more unforgivably destructive
towards this than mobile, which is a younger and inherently more constrained
environment.

This is why bootstrap is so important: it gives the consistent look and feel
to the web that has been missing for so long.

------
x1
Isn't this the same drum that has been beating since the days of desktop
applications... for those old enough to remember when applications where
actually run on a desktop OUTSIDE of a web browser ;).

Actually... even past the dark ages anyone remember the popularity of
webpagesthatsuck.com?

No matter what the technology someone will need to do something that is out of
the bounds of the 'stock user interface'. So you either account for it by
allowing everyone to do anything or you limit it...

<http://www.useit.com/jakob/constbook_preface_2nded.html>

------
eragnew
I would argue that innovation and trying new things are always a net positive.
If you give it enough time (i.e. on a long enough timeline). Because new
standards and best practices emerge. New standards and best practices that are
better than the previous standards and best practices. Yes, it requires effort
and debate to get to that point. But it's better than becoming stale and
irrelevant, IMO.

In fact, I think a new set of best practices is already emerging in mobile app
development. You just have to know where to look.

------
quattrofan
Not a bad article but I dont believe this is the big issue that he makes out.
Mobile apps far less sophisticated than desktop, I have a Galaxy Nexus and
sure there are differences between apps and between things like where the Menu
icon is. The reality is though that you figure them out, it takes an extra
second or so first time you use the app, its not the end of the world.

------
shalmanese
I think it's just a matter of the rapid pace of innovation in the mobile space
right now. The common pattern in innovation is to diverge and then converge.
We're already seeing the convergence around a couple of paradigms like pull
down to refresh and sidebar menus and we're going to see more of them as we
slowly figure out what's the best solution to a design problem.

------
jinushaun
I for one am glad that Tweetie, Path and Facebook broke iOS UI conventions and
innovated. Pull to refresh, stacking views, swipe to show options, FB's peak-
a-boo home screen, etc. If not for these innovations, we'd all be stuck in
tedious UINavigationController and drab UITableView hell. Everything would
look like the Settings app.

------
indubitably
Anal.

------
batista
> _It's been one of my major pet peeves on both Android and iOS: the total and
> utter lack of consistency. Applications - whether first party or third party
> - all seem to live on islands, doing their own thing, making their own
> design choices regarding basic UI interactions, developing their own non-
> standard buttons and controls. Consistency died five years ago, and nobody
> seems to care but me._

Yes, it's called evolution.

As the saying goes, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds".

The consistency he asks for is that foolish consistency --where e.g buttons
all look the same, all colors match, applications have a cookie cutter look,
etc. I.e strictly following some platform's design guidelines.

Not only that would KILL development of new UI concept (a lot of widely
adopted ideas come from some app experimenting with new look&feel ideas), it
would also make any OS look drab and boring.

Consistency that should matter would be more like: drag and drop works
everywhere it should, text copy/paste plays well from app to app (remember
KDE/Gnome/Motif/what have you around 2005? I hope it's better nowadays),
keyboard shortcuts are respected, etc. Generally, controls should MOSTLY work
the same (with the provision for experimentation from the occasional app).

As for things like the color of the toolbar, the look of buttons, etc? Not so
much.

