Mike Fitzmaurice, VP of North America and Chief Evangelist at WEBCON.
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In my previous article, I made the point that users have an easier time adopting applications they find familiar. In an article I contributed to the magazine for this month’s European Cloud Summit, I talked about how design consistency was essential for being able to build low-code solutions at scale.
In both cases, I commented on how artistry is important, but it’s best left to your public-facing website. In fact, artistry would come in handy there, since most corporate websites ironically appear to have been built with the same Bootstrap template.
But then I realized why: It’s because consistency counts there, too.
Consistency In Web Design
Don’t corporate web designers want to turn their websites into works of art? If they’re professionals, they learn that their mission is one of design, and the most important part of that is suitability to purpose.
Google’s search engine optimization algorithms evolve on a regular basis, but their goal remains to rank popularity high, and one measure of popularity is hits (i.e., frequency of use). Not surprisingly, people spend more time on websites that are easy to use.
Corporate websites aren’t being forced to look alike because of cheapness or bureaucracy. Their designers are choosing to follow a consistent look that users find clear and usable, and user behavior has rewarded those choices.
Consistency In Business Applications
The same is true for business applications, perhaps even more so. Users are not likely to love an application; it’s a means to an end along the way to doing their real work. Ideally, it assists with what they need to do without demanding additional work just to use it. Painful software fails to be adopted and will ultimately be bypassed.
One of the easiest and most effective ways for an application to not demand extra work is to behave in a manner consistent with what users expect. Consistency counts in user adoption.
There are supply-side concerns as well. Twenty different business applications built by 20 different developers in 20 different departments based on 20 different visual styles and user experiences means 20 different training efforts and 20 different (and likely slow) adoption curves. It also means 20 independent maintenance efforts if new compliance regulations are enacted, business conditions change or a merger/acquisition takes place.
Inconsistency is expensive—certainly in terms of time and effort, but also in terms of immediate budgetary concerns. Those 20 independent applications likely involved many (perhaps not quite 20, but certainly many) different tool evaluation and procurement efforts.
With consistency comes cost-effectiveness. With consistency comes time and resources that can be allocated to handling issues and functionality that normally have to be set aside to be handled later (if ever). With consistency comes the chance to release a minimum viable product that isn’t just minimum but is genuinely viable.
Consistency And Clarity
In both public-facing websites and corporate business applications, we’ve had decades of experiences, both good and bad, to see what users love and loathe, what they find easy or arcane and so on. While there’s always a chance that someone will invent something new and wonderful, over the past several years, we’ve seen a process of natural selection at work. Users have voted with clicks on what they do and don’t like. A/B testing has taught us a lot about what works and what doesn’t.
The purpose of an application is one of usability, not beauty, and if time is limited, striving for the former produces the greatest good. Functioning in a manner consistent with the task at hand is a form of clarity, and so is making the user’s next step obvious and easily executed. One way to be obvious is to be consistent with what they already know.
Consistency And Artistry
I’d even argue that consistency allows for real creativity.
Tweaking the layout or presentation logic of a website or business application is, well, too easy. It’s change for change’s sake. Again, if you want to be mindful and purposeful, there is a lot of data that already suggests what to do.
Moreover, with a consistent structure on which to hang your efforts, you have an environment in which you can get very creative with the website’s content. You can get creative with an application’s business process logic, too; not every company handles procurement, onboarding, customer service, deliveries, testing and logistics the same way—and those differences determine which companies win and which ones lose.
In Conclusion
We have a lot of work to do to address an application backlog that goes back years, to make developers better understand what users want and need and to make users and business stakeholders understand which things technology makes easy, hard or nearly impossible to deliver. We can’t do that if we treat every application like it’s an opportunity to reinvent the wheel.
Consistency is critical to getting more done. Given that we have learned a lot about what works, consistency saves us time. Consistency yields better results. Consistency in established areas gives us the room we need to be creative in other areas.
Some tools help enforce consistency out of the box, but it’s possible to achieve it manually with a strong set of standards. Either way, the next time you need to develop a new application, how about striving for consistency first and artistry second? Virtually everyone who uses or maintains the application will thank you for it.
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