The biggest key to consistency within a single product is establishing a design system. A design system will provide a set of reusable components, patterns, and guidelines that ensure consistency across different parts of your product. Combine that with knowledge of design principles and your designs will remain consistent. A great resource for design principles is the Nielsen Norman Group. The key to variety, however, comes from feedback from your users. Anytime there's a divergence in the design system or a need for new components and patterns, it should be driven by a need from users.
Consistency in design is crucial for creating a seamless and intuitive user experience. It establishes familiarity and builds trust with users, as they know what to expect across different parts of the interface. However, too much consistency can lead to monotony and boredom. It's essential to strike a balance by introducing elements of variety to keep the design engaging and dynamic. One approach is to maintain consistency in key areas such as typography, color scheme, and navigation while allowing for flexibility in other elements like layout and imagery. For example, in a mobile app, maintaining consistency in button styles and placement helps users navigate effortlessly, while introducing variety in illustrations or background patterns can add visual interest without compromising usability. By carefully managing the balance between consistency and variety, designers can create designs that are both cohesive and visually stimulating, enhancing the overall user experience.
Consistency creates familiarity, while variety adds interest. This balance can be achieved through design systems and reusable components or patterns, ensuring consistency while allowing for flexibility and personalization. Designs for our clients focus on creating inclusive solutions for users with diverse needs, tasks, and accessibility needs. Through research and user testing, we gain insights into different user groups and their challenges. This can range from a student new to the industry but eager to explore, or a well-seasoned associate who is highly focused on their day-to-day tasks and commitments. Balancing that range of user needs and motivation relies on a streamlined content strategy and intuitive wireframing that tells a story, all working together to guide the user. This approach is rooted in empathy and a commitment to creating visually appealing, functional, and accessible designs.
As a CEO of Startup House, I always encourage our UX designers to strike a balance between consistency and variety in their design work. Consistency ensures a seamless user experience, while variety keeps things fresh and engaging. One specific example is when our team was designing a mobile app, we maintained consistency in the navigation and layout across different screens, but added variety through the use of different color schemes and interactive elements to keep users interested and excited about using the app. It's all about finding the right mix to create a memorable and user-friendly design.
Consistency is one of the core attributes of an intuitive UI while variety is an effective way to maintain user interest and engagement. Although seemingly competing, these two attributes can and should coexist in any user experience. As an example, let's consider the design of a meditation app. Consistency is vital to ensure that users can easily perform common tasks such as starting a new meditation session, search for new content, or updating their profiles. In this scenario, establishing a design system that includes consistent typography, color schemes, and layout grids will ensure coherence and familiarity throughout the app. To introduce variety, branded illustration is a very effective method. Branded illustration can play a powerful role in adding visual depth but it can also assist the user in understanding a message or a particular scenario. (ie. an onboarding flow, an empty state, or a pre-set announcement that users can share). Headspace is a great example of finding a balance between consistency and variety.
It's a balance. Consistency can easily become monotonous. Understanding purpose and embracing variety in certain aspects of the experience are important. I would like to give an example of a flight deck in a sci-fi movie. Certainly, having all buttons be the same would serve the purpose of consistency because they would all be equal, but visually, it would be quite boring. From a user experience perspective, it would not be hard to imagine that it would also be a nightmare to operate.
For me, it's to keep my design fundamentals like colors, typography and visual elements as a vast library set in stone. But keep my layouts, user experiences and journeys fun and dynamic across the board. This helps me bring design consisting in terms of fundamentals but keep things interesting within overall designs.