Dana Covit • Sep 21st, 2017
Patience may be a virtue in life, but consistency is make-or-break in business. For design and consumer viability and success, consistency is bedrock to any successful brand. From an internal business perspective, consistency simplifies workflow and processes, allowing designers, developers, marketers, and so on, to work in an efficient manner. Consistency is also important for product legibility and functionality. It’s what makes a product/service easy to adopt, pleasant to use, as well as reliable. It also sets the foundation for creating memorable, even iconic brands. Consistency is what gives your brand something tangible for users/consumers to grasp onto and remember you by. Ultimately, it’s what allows you to stand out from your competitors and create brand loyalists. We asked a few fellow designers to weigh in on why consistency is important to their work.
“When consistency is built-in, there’s no arguing about insignificant details.”
Most designers will talk about the benefits of consistency in terms of its output — consistency promotes a unified and familiar experience, which result in user trust. Although true, I think there’s something to be said about consistency benefiting the internal build process, as well.
Striving for consistency enforces the creation of rules, constraints and artifacts that systematize the build process. This automates the execution of repetitive tasks and takes uncertainty out of the equation, likely leading to an increase in efficiency and productivity. When consistency is built-in, there’s no arguing about insignificant details, which means we can default to what has been systematized and focus on solving problems that actually provide value to users.
“It’s in aggregate, in the feeling of consistency or inconsistency over time, that a brand shines or suffers.”
In my mind, there are two ways of considering the impact of consistency: from the perspective of the business, and from the perspective of the member (at LinkedIn, users of our products are called members).
From the business perspective, centered on workflow and the craft of designing and building products, consistency is important for productivity and morale. We’re very aware that the primary users of our design system are designers and engineers — so we really want to make their lives easier and help them shine. I believe that a better, more consistent user experience is a byproduct of making a design system that is itself consistent and easy to use. So, we work hard to make sure that our system is internally consistent in style, quality, and organization. If our designers and engineers like using it, if it solves their problems of communication, speed, and ergonomics, then they’ll use it a lot, and the business benefits in time and money saved. As an outcome, the product benefits as well. This philosophy is behind our team’s mission statement: “Enable quality design and development at scale.”
One of the places where consistency is particularly important is language. Naming things is always difficult in any system, but we’ve devoted countless hours at this point to ensuring we have consistency in naming that can bridge web and native conventions. In many cases, a designer here will be working on designs for 3 platforms simultaneously, and being able to spec for multiple engineers across web, iOS, and Android using the same names for our components is huge.
From the member perspective, centered on the experience of the product and the value it delivers, consistency is a win for effective task completion and brand sentiment. This might be obvious — applying the same icon, language, and shape for a widely-used call to action makes it easier to find and use, duh — but I believe that it’s in aggregate, in the feeling of consistency or inconsistency over time, that a brand shines or suffers. It’s pretty well-established that negative experiences are felt much more sharply and weighed more heavily than positive ones. If a person struggles or feels frustrated, your product will have to work much harder on delivering the positive and overcoming the pinpricks of negative sentiment.
I believe this concept is true for any touchpoint a person has with your business, but designers have a very direct impact that can scale to a huge audience. Turns out, our instincts for pixel-perfection might not be so crazy after all.
“Consistency leads to familiarity, familiarity leads to trust, and trust gives you superpowers.”
Shopify is a big product and our merchants use it every day to run something very important to them — their business and their livelihood. We also have a number of products that our merchants move between as they do their work every day, from Shopify Mobile, to the web experience, to our Point of Sale software. It’s not only important for products to be internally consistent — they have to work consistently with all of our other products, too. For us, consistency means a merchant doesn’t have to think about how or where they want to do something, they just do it.
As Shopify grew, and the UX team grew with it, we found that our products were diverging. Designers would do things slightly differently, content strategists would use slightly different words… we might use five different icons that all meant the same thing. If you looked at our marketing sites, our web experiences, and our mobile experiences, you’d be hard-pressed to tell that they were all built by the same company. By creating Polaris — our design language — and establishing both a visual and experiential consistency, we were able to quickly bring all of our products back together.
For us, consistency is the baseline that helps us build trust with our merchants. It’s really important for us to be able to innovate and make commerce better — but we can only do that if our merchants trust us. Consistency leads to familiarity, familiarity leads to trust, and trust gives you superpowers. You need to set expectations before you can exceed them, so having a solid and consistent foundation means our merchants trust that, when things change, we’re doing it for the right reasons.
And that’s what’s important to us. Consistency isn’t the goal. The goal is trust, and how we can then use that trust to innovate. Consistency is one of our best tools to get there.
“[Consistency] creates familiarity and builds trust between a brand and its audience.”
Consistency is one of the unbreakable laws of good branding. Repeated use of the same imagery, in the same manor, creates familiarity and builds trust between a brand and its audience. By seeing the same images continually come from one source, people learn to expect the same result from that source. If imagery from one brand regularly differs, it could create confusion about the reliability of the product.
One of our clients, World Space Week, organizes events all over the world for one week each year. The credibility of each event relies on the usage of the core World Space Week brand. Cosma Schema overhauled their global brand by implementing a system that ensures every event utilizes official branding. When the new brand rolls out in early 2018, there will no longer be any question whether the space event you’re attending is the real deal, or not.