Consistency: Doing the Same Thing Can Be Useful!

Another day, another design post, but this post is not going to be that huge because I’ve already shown you several examples of what I’m talking about today. Systems are more usable when similar parts are expressed in similar ways – that’s why OS X’s steady convergence with iOS is probably going to bring more people to both platforms than lose grumpy people who don’t like the ‘new’ interface. If one Apple platform allows you the familiarity to use any other, the consistency will make people happy.

And that’s today’s principle for discussion: consistency. Again, it’s from Universal Principles of Design, Lidwell et al, Revised, 2010. People will learn new things more quickly, focus on the right things and be able to transfer their knowledge more easily if the system is consistent. There are four basic considerations and I’m going to show them to you in exactly the same format that I’ve been using for all of these posts. Well, I’ve been trying to be consistent. It’s possibly been similar enough that when you see bold italic you think ‘design principle’ and when you see a bulleted list with leading bolds you think ‘aspect’ or ‘facet’. Sorry for the priming but I’m trying to make a point here 🙂 Anyway, here are the four kinds of consistency.

1. Aesthetic consistency: Is everything similar or the same in terms of style and appearance? I adopted a standard template for my lectures in one course, with strong visual indicators of transitions to different modes. As a result, students always knew which lecture they were in and what was expected of them in terms of participation and activity.
2. Functional consistency: This is consistency in what things mean and how they’re used. How do students hand-in their work – do they always do the same things to make a hand-in work? Does button X always produce result Y? We can also use pre-existing knowledge of function to our benefit and save ourselves the effort of having to teach someone how to approach our work, from scratch. Use existing knowledge of functional actions, and their associated symbols, to make your work easier. (Here’s a thinking point: the save Icon for many systems is an image of a 3.5″ floppy disk. I polled my students and over 70% of them had only seen the disk in this context. What does ‘save’ look like in a cloud-based context?)
3. Internal consistency: The elements inside your system or set of materials should be consistent with each other. Once you’ve learned one part of the system, the others won’t surprise you by being completely different. This also makes people believe that you have actually bothered to design a system, rather than stitch it together out of other, inconsistent, parts.
4. External consistency: How do your objects, materials or systems work inside the overall environment of your students? This is a tricky one because innovation sometimes means that you’re out of step (let’s say ahead of step) with other people. Just because nobody else uses lecture recordings and you do isn’t a violation of external consistency. However, there will be core design standards across most areas (to at least a degree) and adherence to these is important or it’s easy for students to get confused. If you are diverging from this standard, you must take the additional effort to address the inconsistency to reduce confusion.

As Lidwell notes, aesthetic and functional consistency should be considered in almost everything we do – aesthetic consistency allows us to produce a distinct idea, and functional consistency makes it easier for people to learn. The other requirements drive the need for internal and external specifications that work and are observed. All we’re really doing here is trying to make it easier for people to learn, and that should never really be that controversial.

(Wait, what was that about priming? And haven’t you mentioned that before? Yes, I have. Further discussion is coming soon.)

If you’ve got five thinking hats, I’ve got five hat racks for you!

This isn’t actually a post about Edward de Bono’s Five Thinking Hats, although that’s a fascinating book to describe adopting different modes for different cognitive activities. Once we get out of design week, I hope to come back to this. Part of designing any materials or object is to ensure that the information it represents or makes available is organised in a way that people can use. No textbook of any value is organised along Dadaist principles – semi-random and deliberately nonsensical organisation – they all use well-established idioms like chapters, headings and indexes (indices?) to organise the information and make it more accessible. One of the things I like about the reference I’m using (Universal Principles of Design, Lidwell et all, Revised, 2010) is that all of the design principles are organised alphabetically but, wherever you start, there is a see also section down the bottom that takes you to a conceptually linked entry. You can then, of course, use alphabetical search or the index to then locate it.

According to the Five Thinking Hats principle, there are a limited number of organisational strategies that you can use to organise information. These can be used for just about any application.

1. Category: We can organise things by their similarity or relatedness. In teaching materials for Computer Science, we often group similar programming concepts together – loops with loops, conditionals with conditionals. Most texts are going to use categorisation to minimise the cognitive load of context switching from one area to another, and having to remember what you read before. Will your students try to search out things by category? Probably – that’s how their access to your college’s web site handles their enrolment details, most likely, by grouping all relevant courses into a common category. But why not tag all materials relevant to Assignment 2 under a search item ‘stuff for Assignment 2’? That’s an easy use of categorisation.
2. Time: Lecture recordings are a natural fit for time-based organisation because they present a set of events that are dependent upon each other and evolve over time. Yes, you could put them into a folder sorted by lecture name but, unless your lectures are really not connected at all, no-one is going to thank you for that. Schedules and historical timelines are also fairly obvious candidates for temporal strategies.
3. Location: Grouping things by their geographical or spatial reference helps people successfully orient themselves to work with your materials. While it may seem that this is of little use to people who aren’t teaching geography, what about making a clear distinction between things that students need for lectures and those that they need for tutorials or practicals? Wherever your students are – what do they need when they get there? Is it clearly identified wherever your materials are or do they need to search through everything to find out what they need?
4. Alphabet:  You didn’t think I’d leave this one out did you? The alphabet is always a good fallback when people will be using your work as a reference and not reading it sequentially, or you want to be able to leap around the work efficiently. If you can’t think of any other way – go for the alphabet. Of course, this assumes that whoever reading your work is familiar with your alphabet. This must be a consideration if you’re working with people who have your language as their second, or third, language.
5. Continuum: Some things can be grouped by their magnitude – students are all familiar with this if you’ve ever posted a list of grades from top to bottom, rather than by ID. Best to worst, highest to lowest, largest to smallest. This kind of organisation can be handy for electronic materials where you have a variety of recording types and some produce larger files. Providing a list to students can be organised by type or by size. If you know that students prefer the smaller, faster to download, ones, sort to put them up there first. If you’re comparing things across one key measure, think about how you could group along that measure to make the information easier to access.

Now, this may explain why I try to put these blog posts into some sort of context by talking about ‘opinion’ and ‘design’ as weekly themes. The posts are already ordered by time but I add a categorical overview because the actual categories and tags are used for people finding these posts, not necessarily for people who are already reading my blog. This loose organisation, that I usually make at least an oblique reference to at the start of each post, helps you to categorise the information in the post. How do you group your ideas and materials?