Maximising Consistency in Design

Summary

Consistency allows for your user to learn things once. A core concept in good UX design and a technique that improves accessibility, consistency in design is a great place to start.

Design consistency ensures that your website looks coherent. Having a standardised styling and layout, using the same symbols and replicating the same functionality behind interactive elements will help with your website's usability.

Why is Consistency important?

Having a consistent design throughout your site will improve your users experience and enhance the overall look and feel. It allows users to navigate the site with ease and predict what a certain action will do.

Some of the key areas that consistency can help with:

• Usability and Accessibility

  Taking advantage of universally accepted standards in using common and identifiable icons and interaction triggers (Buttons, arrows , ....) allows a user to understand and use functionality without explanation.

• Trust

  By maintaining a consistent use and meaning, your site will continuously reaffirm a user's expectations and build up a users trust.

Some Practical Examples:

• Buttons

  Using consistent styles and shape of buttons will help your user avoid errors. They can move more confidently through a process, improving speed and reducing the need to think about the options.

• Navigations

  Consistent navigation means that the navigation structure, design and names of links and menus are consistent across all pages of a website. This allows users to navigate the website more easily, find the content they are looking for and move effectively through the different pages.

• Functional

  Controls that work similarly make up for functional consistency; they impact how the user predicts the control’s usage and its outcome.

Style guide

A style guide can do the hard work when creating consistency. Having a detailed style guide for documenting the specifications of various design elements creates a cohesive list to pick component from when designing. The specifications collected can relate to the sizes, typefaces, colors, proportions, and rules, which should be used when creating new material.

Conclusion

Adding design consistency from the start is an easy way to introduce usability and accessibility to your site.