Using situations is a more effective way to design guidance

Consistency is a common concept in design. Good consistency will help enterprises to create brand image, significantly reduce customer/user learning costs and cognitive costs; From a system perspective, a highly consistent process is also the basis for ensuring product quality and operational efficiency. The most famous example here is McDonald's VI and product line.

However, how important is the principle of consistency and under what circumstances can it be broken?

I think that in many cases, considering the use of situations is a more effective way to design guidance.

Whether the user expects to be satisfied is the most basic element of the user experience, and the usage situation determines the user's expectation on the product under what circumstances. If you can take into account a certain situation in the user's needs and behavior habits, often can bring unexpected joy. I like the example Shenze straight in a speech: "... In places where there is no umbrella, almost everyone will put an umbrella on the wall, and the other end of the umbrella is placed in the gap between tile and tile. In this case, when you build a new house ..., as long as you open a seam on the ground, when your home to the guests, he will put an umbrella there. ”

In some specific situations, in order to better enhance the user experience, it is worth breaking the "consistency" rule. Let's look at how the iphone input keyboard, when sending text messages and entering URLs, uses context to overwhelm consistency:

Imagine, when you are in the Safari address bar after the Lanrenux, is depressed ready to enter ". com", suddenly found this button under the thumb of the surprise!

So the next time you worry about whether you want to deploy exactly the same global navigation for your Web site, if you want to unify the styles and copywriting of all the buttons, don't be bound by the "consistency" box, think about what the user wants to accomplish in this situation, what they really need, and maybe get a different answer.