Designed for Use, 2nd Edition

Identifying Archetypes

But what kinds of differences are we talking about?

Quite often, we are talking about appearance. Things don’t look quite right. Buttons in an application don’t look quite like the host system’s default buttons. Windows look a bit different from each other. Scroll bars look slightly strange.

Visual inconsistencies are very obvious, so people notice them easily. However, this focus on how things look is misguided. Often, when it comes to usability, appearance doesn’t matter all that much. Humans are not stupid. You don’t need to make elements look exactly the same in order for them to be immediately identifiable. For example, even though they look quite different, all of these buttons are clearly identifiable as buttons: ...