Consistency in Design is the Wrong Approach

UX Strategy with Jared Spool, a Center Centre — UIE newsletter focused on bringing UX to a strategic level inside your organization.

Current Knowledge is a much better way to think about the problem.

Consistency in design is about making elements uniform — having them look and behave the same way. We often hear designers talk about consistent navigation, consistent page layouts, or consistent control elements. In each case, the designer is looking for a way to leverage the usability by creating uniformity. After all, if the user learns to operate the design in one place, why not have that knowledge transfer to the next. This is all good. But wrong.

For example, let’s look at a design decision our friends at Avis.com once made. At the time, they chose to use the asterisk (*) to denote optional fields instead of denoting mandatory fields. Less than 10% of the fields on the entire site are optional. If they were consistent with the outside world, entire forms would have every field denoted with an asterisk. That might create its own problems.

So, Avis.com’s designers did what designers are supposed to do: they made a choice. They chose to be inconsistent with practically every other form on the web. But they were internally consistent with themselves.