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The death of consistency in UI design

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Re: The death of consistency in UI design

#21

Post by 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.

Re: The death of consistency in UI design

#23

Post by Kerrick »

mikeryan wrote: post #19

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 tr…

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.

Re: The death of consistency in UI design

#24

Post by mikeryan »

Kerrick wrote: post #23
mikeryan wrote: post #19

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 tr…

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…

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.

Re: The death of consistency in UI design

#25

Post by Too »

drcube wrote: post #13

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 disc…

Agree! And it's getting even worse with all smartphones.

1. Icons are used far more often on smartphones to save space.

2. You don't have any mouse cursor to hover with and get a tooltip, you are left with the option to gamble and click or never try the button.

The gmail android app is horrible in this sense, "send" is just some weird arrow in the top right corner, i first thought it would open some menu. Fortunately it showed a confirmation dialog first...The rest of the icons aren't much better.

Re: The death of consistency in UI design

#26

Post by sigkill »

drcube wrote: post #13

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 disc…

The ICS browser is the worst offender of this. If you enable Labs mode, the address bar disappears away and you need to gesture-swipe from the screen edge to get a semi-circular menu. Now, this in itself is a brilliant idea, only marred by the fact that it's a bunch of icons that you can't understand. I'd love if they added a big semi-transparent textbox on the top informing you which option is currently under your finger, something analogous to the alphabets that popup when you're scrubbing through the contact alphabet list.

Re: The death of consistency in UI design

#27

Post by 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.

Re: The death of consistency in UI design

#28

Post by Someone »

TorbjornLunde wrote: post #27

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 expressi…

Additionally, there is the argument that today's users are way more familiar with the language of UIs. Because of that, some bandwidth that used to be necessary to drive home the message "this is what you can do here" can be used for other purposes.

And for those wondering about whether that "more familiar" argument has merit: the same has happened in movies. Nowadays, everyone can follow what happens in a movie if, in a scene immediately following one shot in the New York office, a shop owner has a slight French accent. In early movies, such a change required intermediate scenes showing someone taking a cab to the airport (and saying "to the airport" to the driver), getting in a plane, getting out of the plane, etc.

Re: The death of consistency in UI design

#29

Post by jamesgeck0 »

JVIDEL wrote: post #5

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

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.

Re: The death of consistency in UI design

#30

Post by freehunter »

Too wrote: post #25
drcube wrote: post #13

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 disc…

Agree! And it's getting even worse with all smartphones. 1. Icons are used far more often on smartphones to save space. 2. You don't have any mouse cursor to hover with and get a tooltip, you are left with the option to gamble and click or never try the button. The gmail android app is horrible in this sense, "send" is just some weird arrow in the top right corner, i first thought it would open some menu. Fortunately…

Windows Phone has a workable solution for this. Icons are shown for menus, but if you don't know what the icon means you can tap the ... at the edge of the menu bar and it pops up with some text underneath.
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