— Ralph waldo emerson
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds…”
The number of times consistency, as a concept, has been weaponized in UX is completely unacceptable, so I love this quote if for no other reason than it ruffles feathers when I use it. But, to understand its true relevance to UX and design as a whole, you actually need the whole passage from Self Reliance.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self Reliance
Here’s what he’s saying (or at least how I interpret it):
- Consistency is for people with little practical experience. It’s easy to be consistent when your experience is theoretical. Reality is messy and requires flexibility and game-time decision-making.
- Consistency is intellectually lazy. Don’t use consistency as an excuse not to examine the context and make your own decisions. Take the time and energy to change your mind when presented with new information.
- Who cares if that makes you unpredictable? It’s much better to be known for being thoughtful and right than it is for people to think they know what you’ll say without asking.
Consistency is a valuable concept in UX because inconsistency in our interaction designs can create a lot of cognitive load for users, but it is not a goal in and of itself. It is incumbent upon the designer to remember who consistency is for, and what it accomplishes. Always be sure you are employing consistency for the benefit of the user, not yourself, and always as a way of lowering cognitive load. If you find yourself using a design pattern that makes it harder to accomplish a task for the sake of consistency, it’s time to start over because you have lost the plot.
Emerson’s last point (about unpredictability) is my favorite part, and not just because I like being compared to Jesus. It’s particularly relevant to design because of the proportion of people who want to feel like they understand it and can practice it on their own or in your place without engaging with it very deeply at all. Almost every stakeholder (and most designers) I’ve worked with has been surprised by a decision of mine that defies their expectations because of their own cognitive biases. In their mind, the right thing to do is X, and because I argued for X in a past conversation, they assume I’ll be in favor of X again, when in fact, the context surrounding this new decision makes me argue in favor of Y.
My favorite simple example of this is date pickers. On many occasions, I have surprised (even upset) stakeholders, developers, and other designers by recommending a date picker that wasn’t what they expected. There are different factors at play for different types of dates. For example, if you are picking dates for a flight, it might be useful to see what day of the week a particular date is, whereas that is not helpful at all if you’re putting your date of birth into a form. In fact, if the date you need to input is significantly further than 30 days in the future or past, the calendar picker you use elsewhere might make things considerably harder. And yet, I have often had people, even designers, argue with me that the right thing to do in all cases is to use a standard 30-day visual calendar picker, no matter what.
There is, of course, value in the user’s understanding of how to use the standard 30-day visual calendar picker, and I understand how someone could choose to employ it in an inappropriate context, especially if they’ve never watched someone struggle with that damn thing. That’s actually explicitly my point. It is easy to understand how they can favor consistency if they don’t have a lot of practical experience, can’t or won’t take the time to actually solve the problem, and aren’t willing to be misunderstood.