Consistency is one of the most important UX design principles. It helps users to understand, learn, and trust your product. But how do you keep your UX design consistent across different screens, devices, and features? Here are some tips and best practices to help you achieve a coherent and harmonious UX design.
A design system is a collection of reusable components, guidelines, and standards that define the visual and functional aspects of your product. It helps you to maintain consistency, efficiency, and quality throughout your design process and across your team. A design system should include elements such as typography, colors, icons, layouts, grids, patterns, interactions, animations, and accessibility. You can use tools like Figma, Sketch, or Adobe XD to create and share your design system.
Having a standardized collection of elements streamlined our design process, ensuring cohesive visual and interactive experiences. It wasn't just about color or fonts; it involved defining animations, layouts, and component interactions. This living document evolved with the product, and tools like Figma facilitated collaboration. The challenge was maintaining the system's relevance and integrating feedback from users and team members. By investing in this design system, we reduced redundancy and fostered a shared understanding, ensuring alignment and consistency in our UX design.
While many individuals perceive UX design solely as the realm of visual cues — fonts, colors, buttons, animations, icons, and the like — there exists another vital facet interlinked with UX design: UX Taxonomy. Establishing design consistency is pivotal for a proficient User Experience. However, it is equally crucial to maintain uniformity in the terminologies employed. For instance, if you use 'Okay,' 'Cancel,' 'Yes,' and 'No' in your UI design to close a pop-up or alert, the user may struggle to discern the distinctions, leading to decision-making confusion. To avert such clashes and perplexity, it's imperative to ensure consistency in UX writing as well.
Conventions are the established norms and expectations that users have when they interact with a product. They are based on common practices, patterns, and standards that are widely used and recognized in the industry. For example, users expect that a hamburger menu will open a navigation drawer, or that a search icon will trigger a search function. By following common conventions, you can reduce confusion, increase familiarity, and improve usability. You can use resources like UI Patterns, UXPin, or Awwwards to find and learn from common conventions.
Can a wheel assume a hexagonal shape? The answer is yes. Can it still be functional? Yes, but within a highly uncommon context. While showcasing creativity is valuable, it's not always prudent to reinvent the wheel. Introducing unfamiliar designs challenges users to approach tasks in unanticipated ways. This can elevate cognitive load, causing unnecessary stress and frustration, potentially leading users to abandon the task midway. If the design lacks usability, it becomes a squandered investment of time and effort, regardless of its aesthetics or intricate craftsmanship.
Language is a crucial part of UX design. It communicates your brand personality, tone, and voice, as well as your product functionality, features, and benefits. It also guides users through their tasks, goals, and journeys. To keep your UX design consistent, you should use consistent language across your product. This means using the same terms, labels, buttons, headings, messages, and instructions throughout your screens and flows. You should also avoid jargon, slang, and ambiguity, and use clear, concise, and friendly language. You can use tools like Grammarly, Hemingway, or Content Design to check and improve your language.
Using consistent language is beneficial for creating a seamless experience. When the terms, message, and voice across platforms are aligned, it establishes a sense of clarity and familiarity for users. For example, if a “Delete” button is labeled “Delete” on one screen and “Remove” on another, it will confuse users. Standardizing copy makes the flow more intuitive. Consistent language also solidifies branding. Using directed slogans, phrasing, and messaging consistently engages users every step of the way. This helps build brand memory and fosters trust.
Testing and iterating your design is essential to ensure that your UX design is consistent and meets the needs and expectations of your users. You should test your design with real users, using methods such as usability testing, user feedback, surveys, analytics, or A/B testing. You should also test your design on different devices, browsers, and platforms, to ensure that it works and looks well across different scenarios and conditions. You should use the insights and data from your testing to identify and fix any inconsistencies, errors, or gaps in your design.
A style guide and a checklist are two useful tools that can help you to keep your UX design consistent. A style guide is a document that summarizes and explains the key elements and rules of your design system. It helps you to reference and apply your design system consistently and correctly throughout your product. A checklist is a list of items that you need to check and verify before you finalize and deliver your design. It helps you to avoid missing or overlooking any details or requirements that could affect your design consistency. You can use tools like Frontify, Zeroheight, or Checklist Design to create and manage your style guides and checklists.
Learning how to build components helped me to become a better planner, and to think about consistency and expandability from the beginning. For me, the two have been very connected. If you create a component that is inherently flexible, it will mean you'll be able to reuse it more in the future, which also means your design will inherently be more consistent. As a simple example, designing a component so that copy has space to flow –?or can expand the component to continue to flow – beyond the use case that you're immediately designing for.