The death of consistency in UI design

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

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.

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.

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.

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.