Getting to Consistency: Don’t Make Your Users Think
Jennifer Fraser (Corel), Alex Graveley (VMWare), Steve Johnson (Adobe)
• Consistency may not be indicated just to be consistent. It is important for similar functions, but each app needs identity.
• Cross platform compatibility can cause a cost to being consistent.
• If you are not careful, consistency becomes legacy.
• A focus upon features is not always inline with customer goals. Consistency might mean changing features to meet the same customer goals.
• This discussion could have greatly benefitted from having one of the people from the Microsoft Office team that developed the ribbon interface.
• Determining the workflows (use cases) for an app determines the environments that need to have consistency.
• Workspaces: role-based feature sets – not aimed at current, users, but as an entry point for new users (- Adobe guy)
• Apps on the web do not have extroverted consistency – no HIG.