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The death of consistency in UI design

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Re: The death of consistency in UI design

#31

Post by radley »

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…

Initially all apps looked and felt different. It wasn't until apps started to live within a window on the desktop that consistency became a popular topic and concern.

Re: The death of consistency in UI design

#32

Post by 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.

Re: The death of consistency in UI design

#33

Post by grecy »

jamesgeck0 wrote: post #29
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'…

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

Re: The death of consistency in UI design

#34

Post by BadLogInMyAss »

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…

Bunk. This is a functional problem, caused by intentional obscurity. This is a replay of the "skinning" fad of 10 or more years ago, which thankfully died on the desktop.

A great example is this ridiculous Clear list-making app for the iPhone that pointlessly eschews listviews and disclosure indicators in favor of... nothing. You're supposed to guess at what to pinch or swipe, and there no visible difference between and individual item and a collection.

UI failure.

Re: The death of consistency in UI design

#35

Post by timc3 »

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…

Up until recently Native controls, limited font choices limited bandwidth and in the past limited colors constrained.

Re: The death of consistency in UI design

#36

Post by Joeri »

timc3 wrote: post #35
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…

Up until recently Native controls, limited font choices limited bandwidth and in the past limited colors constrained.

Limited? I wish. Remember all those sites with the big cyan comic sans image text banners? I'm glad the web's wild days of experimentation are a decade in the past.

Re: The death of consistency in UI design

#37

Post by imd »

Joeri wrote: post #36
timc3 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Up until recently Native controls, limited font choices limited bandwidth and in the past limited colors constrained.

Limited? I wish. Remember all those sites with the big cyan comic sans image text banners? I'm glad the web's wild days of experimentation are a decade in the past.

Limited indeed. Comic Sans was one of the ~11 web-safe typefaces that you could count on pretty much everyone to have. Now that there's a bunch of good-looking embeddable typefaces, people don't face as much temptation to use shitty Comic Sans.

Re: The death of consistency in UI design

#38

Post by drcube »

dr42 wrote: post #20
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…

it just doesn't make sense for mobile to have keyboard-shortcuts, the analog would be you touch the button, rather than bringing up a keyboard and typing shift-zz

I'd like something physical I can feel and use muscle memory to remember. Having to search the screen, interpret some obscure glyph and make sure I touch the right spot requires far too much attention for most tasks.

Volume down + left swipe to save a file. Camera button + screen tap to go to the app's home screen. Something like that, so I don't have to look. I'm not entirely familiar with screen gestures, but I guess that's the closest analog, so long as they aren't too complicated or picky.

Re: The death of consistency in UI design

#39

Post by BadLogInMyAss »

abraxasz wrote: post #4

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 iPhon…

The difference is that these experiments involved NEW controls, not NO controls. This fad of hiding everything and leaving users to guess what they're supposed to do defies common sense.

I'm trying to get stuff done; I shouldn't be forced to play Myst with the UI.

Re: The death of consistency in UI design

#40

Post by shashashasha »

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…

Your point about Helvetica reminds me of this line from a post written today by Armin:

"Helvetica is the fixed-gear bike of typefaces: it’s as basic as it gets, but the statement it makes is as complex as anything else."

http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/new_univ...

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