Consistency Revisited
Well, there’s nothing like a gentle, well-reasoned rebuttal to make one
reconsider his
statements. To be honest, I didn’t expect anyone to take much notice
of my little essay on the issue of Apple user interface consistency, and I
was both surprised and gratified to see
John and Matt in particular made me think twice about my post—Matt because he seems like such an all around nice guy and yet I was, by implication, comparing him to (cringe!) Jakob Nielsen; John because he seems to present such a well-developed philosophy of what the essential qualities of “Macintoshness” are.
One of John’s statements in particular hit me right where it hurts:
It’s not pedantry that inspires Mac afficionados to gripe about Apple’s violations of the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines. It’s not that the HIG is simply a list of rules to which a bunch of us nerdy Mac experts demand blind adherence only for the sake of following rules. It’s that the guidelines outlined in the HIG form a cohesive whole describing a philosophy of design.
This is absolutely true, and I, a self-professed admirer of rigorous, Bauhaus-style design, should certainly admit it.
While I don’t exactly back down from my statement that “Consistency is
valuable, but only as long as it doesn’t stifle innovation,” John’s well-reasoned response compels me to add a proviso: the case where innovation trumps consistency is exceptional. I still feel justified in expanding the debate by defending Apple’s right to depart from their own HIG, but I must also add that this is a right which, like the right to amend the US Constitution, must not be taken lightly. Unfortunately, as Erik, Vinay, and John have been pointing out, Apple hasn’t exactly been conservative in its approach to UI development lately, and a lot of its recent design work has absolutely screamed “design for design’s sake.” All of this is, of course, very “un-Bauhaus” and, all things considered, very “un-Apple.”