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Chapter 19 Consistency

Consistency is a pretty popular word in the area of user interface criticism; when we dislike user interfaces, we often attribute our dislike to a “lack of consistency.”

But what is consistency?

Merriam-Webster says that consistency is the “agreement or harmony of parts or features to one another or a whole.” Simply put, when we say that a user interface isn’t consistent, we mean that it isn’t in agreement with its host system or with popular applications on its host system, or that different features in a product don’t agree with each other. We mean that it is different from other products we already know or that different ...

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