CONSISTENCY IN DESIGN
Consistency means an agreement or harmony of parts or features to one another or a whole. It can also mean correspondence or uniformity.
Consistency is a major principle in Design. It means using similar elements- placement, styling, icons, colours, type, size, space, and function, therefore saving time & effort while making the user’s interaction with the design smooth and effortless.
If something is well structured, it’s always easy to use. This goes for your design and its content, also when there is a change in a familiar function or it doesn’t work how they expect due to familiarity with other products (app/website), users will get discouraged.
Consistency of colour in your design will make it look very attractive and eye-catching to a user. Making use of too many colours, especially when it doesn’t match nor does it look attractive is a major reason for a user to get uninterested in using an app or viewing a website.
The use of many different typefaces in your design makes it look unattractive. Seeing this, the users will be confused or irritated which might even get them frustrated and tired of checking out the contents as it is distracting.
Another element to look at especially when designing a webpage is the header/footer, these elements need to be consistently placed. If the header on the homepage was left-aligned, it wouldn’t make sense for you to centralize it on another page, that is the reason you have to use these elements uniformly.
Even the images used in your design must pass the same information, same as your content. The theme of your content can’t be on finance and you’re writing something that doesn’t relate to it on another section of your design- writing content for entertainment is very different from writing content for finance.
When functions are given an unfamiliar name, it might get the user confused, for example, when you replace Menu with something else that they’re not familiar with, they will get lost and might just abandon the app/website. So, always make use of the usual terms.
In conclusion, consistency is like a thread that ties all the elements in a design together to make it effective and easy to recognize and provide a good user experience.
