Why a Portfolio of Websites Needs to Have Flexible UI Standards

As more-and-more brands increase their online presence, they’ll be faced with a dilemma: create strict UI standards, or flexible UI guidelines.

There are pros and cons associated with either choice but, with the chancing face of the internet, flexible guidelines seem to be the best option.

Firstly, let me explain what I mean by UI standards or guidelines. Anytime a online style guide is created, there should be a section for UI and UX guidelines. Creating this type of document is often lead by the creative team. When creating this section, you’ll be faced with the decision to create strict or flexible guidelines. Note: Not all online style guides govern an entire portfolio of sites or the entire brands online presence, but a more succinct user experience will be achieved if the style guide takes everything into consideration.

I recommend having the following sections, relaying the following information, within this section:

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Considerations when defining a guideline

Cross-Domain Frequency

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Description: How often your users move between the different web properties your brand owns or has an established presence. If each site caters to a different audience, there might only need to be branding similarities – rather than UI consistency.

Question to ask: How often do users interact with your multiple online properties each session?

 

 

Importance and Impact to User Experience

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 Description: The reasoning behing applying this guideline to all sites. For instance, if a consistent link style across all platforms increases usability for 4% of users it might be worth implementing, but if it didn’t increase usability for anyone it would be better to allow different link styles on each site. This can be easily measured through remote usability testing.

Question to ask: How does this guideline contribute to an improved user experience? Answer in the form:  This guideline will provide consistency when creating __________ , which is important to the user experience because _____________.

 

Dependencies

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Description: Some conventions will work for all situations, but some require that additional conventions be established. A good example are tool-tips: Some forms can open a tool tip when a user interacts with the form field, but some forms (like radio buttons and drop down lists) will require an icon or label to trigger the tool tip.

Another great example are the search fields associated with google and youtube. There are consistent elements, but diveate when it benefits the user.

Question to Ask: Will this guideline work for all defined use cases?

 

Context

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Description: Some conventions work when in context with specific content, visual design, or other conventions; and don’t work outside of that context. A good example is the left navigation established on sears.com – This navigation works very well for the amount of content on the site, but wouldn’t work as well for a microsite, or the sears card site.

Another great example is any site that has a registration process and checkout, but the primary site is more of a brochure site. You might want to create a guideline that suggests that the header/ footer be omnipresent, but it’s often better to remove all distractions during registration and check-out.

Question to Ask: Does this guideline enable the optimum user experience when examined in different contexts?

 

As an experience strategist, the only thing I dislike more than a poor user experience is being forced to create a poor user experience due to a lack of understanding of how strict guidelines and rules interfere with experience architecture. Although this often comes from either creative directors, or clients who are misinformed; it can happen at any level when online brand/ style guildelines are created.

In the end here’s my advice to anyone relying on established guidelines to inform the UX of a site build or redesign: If the guildeline doesn’t support a good user experience, it needs to be re-examined. Strict, detailed guidelines tend to get outdated quickly, and broad guidlines tend to last for years (if not, forever).

If you’re a marketer and you’re agency creates guidelines for a portfolio of sites that suggest unreasonably strict UX/ UI, question them on it. Fight for guidelines that focus on great user experience over unnessessary consistency.

Share your thoughts below, or let me know what you think on Twitter.

 

 

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