This one’s not so much a hack as it is something we all need to spend more time thinking about. But don’t underestimate the enormous effect it can have on making your product much more professional and usable.
Worry less about making your product’s interface innovative and cool and elegant, and spend more time worrying about making your product consistent.
For example, imagine you’re building a web application. How many different top-level navigational layouts should you have? If your answer is anything other than “one,” then you need to think about how many products you’re actually building.
This is a common problem that causes users to get incredibly lost. It tends to happen when products start growing quickly without much UX oversight. Companies that have multiple groups working simultaneously on different features are particularly susceptible to this problem, since new sections of the product can be built with little to no knowledge of other features that are also being designed.
The biggest problem with inconsistency is that it’s mentally taxing for your users. Imagine if every time you went to a product page on Amazon you had to actively search for the buy button because it was always in a different place. I’ll bet you’d buy less stuff. (Note to Amazon: Please move the buy button randomly. I’m going broke here.)
Inconsistency also makes your product feel less finished and professional, which can be a serious problem for companies who are hoping that people will give them money.
An important tool in combating inconsistency is understanding why your product is becoming inconsistent in the first place. If it’s because you’re shipping things too fast to keep them consistent, then you can solve this problem by doing quick sweeps periodically to find the inconsistencies and fix them.
If, on the other hand, it’s being caused because you have too many people working on different features, you can often reduce the problem by using simple style guides and frameworks, which I discuss in the next section.
And, of course, if you’re being inconsistent because you just can’t be bothered to be consistent...well, cut it out. You’re making yourself look bad, and it’s really easy to fix.
