Designed for Use, 2nd Edition

In-App Consistency

But that’s just consistency with the host operating system. Since people have a lot of experience with how their system works, any slight deviation will be perceived as an error.

What about your application, though? Should you try to make your application internally consistent?

You should, but there is an important qualification to be made.

Making things consistent does not mean making everything look the same. It means making things look the same that behave the same, and making things look different that behave differently. In fact, things that look the same, but behave differently, are a much bigger source of error and confusion than things that look different, but behave the same.

Here’s an example. In an application I ...