Creating UX consistency in your organization isn’t simply an exercise in vanity or fashion. It’s an important component that contributes to the success of your business.

And consistent UX is about more than simply keeping with the brand colors palette and fonts and everything else that’s important to your graphic design team--though that is part of it. But UX consistency is more about how your site or app behaves and how a user can expect to interact with your brand.

Here are 3 reasons why a consistent UX is always a better UX.

1. Familiarity in a UI increases usability.

Leverage common and current UI practices in order to make your user experience more intuitive. This doesn’t mean stealing others’ designs, but it does mean that you should pay attention to the way a user interface within your given field or discipline is typically expected to behave.

When you use UI components that you know your user will be familiar with, you decrease their need to learn how to navigate your brand’s online experience. When a user comes to your site, they are curious about what your brand can offer them.

Putting the obstacle of needing to learn how your site works before getting to the information or services they are searching for only serves to increase frustration and decrease the likelihood of a successful conversion.

2. Clear UX is better than clever UX.

When creating UX, designers and developers often want to provide an experience that feels unique and creative. However, innovation isn’t defined by how cool something looks, but by how using it makes our lives easier, more efficient, and more pleasant. So making sure your UX is clear is far more important than making it clever.

Here are some key aspects of UX that you will want to consider and make sure that you’re paying attention to.

CONSISTENT LANGUAGE 

When naming parts of your site, make sure you use terminology that is easy to understand and familiar to your users. For example, if you are creating an email application, you’ll want to use terms like inbox, sent, and draft in your UI, as opposed to something like received, outgoing, and in-process.

Furthermore, if you have widget or button names unique to your organization, those names should be consistent across every channel of your experience.

CONSISTENT ICONS, BADGES, & NOTIFICATIONS SOUNDS

Another part of consistency is the look of your site features. For certain icons that perform given functions, they should be consistent across different applications. If one icon is a bell on one channel, it ought not be a hammer on another channel--if it is performing the same function. That would introduce unnecessary confusion.

Furthermore, badges and notification systems should have a consistent look and feel across devices and apps, down to the sounds that accompany them.

In fact, notification sounds are an important opportunity for your brand to create a unique identity. Think about the sound of a message on Slack or Facebook Messenger; or the notification reminder from your Amazon Alexa device. These sounds are immediately recognizable and associated with their respective brands. You miss this opportunity when the sound isn’t consistent across every device and channel.

A PREDICTABLE LAYOUT

When users come to a site or use an application, they expect to be able to easily find certain functions in predictable places. This is not the place to be creative. For example, a link to your homepage (probably with your company’s logo) should typically go in the top left corner of your website. On a mobile site, the hamburger menu should typically go on the top left or top right. It should not be difficult to find your search bar or other common features or functions of a typical site in your industry.

By laying out your site or app in such a way that users will intuitively know where to go, even from their first use of it, you are well on your way to providing an intuitive experience across the board.

3. Inconsistent UX hurts your brand equity.

If you have more than online experience or application within your organization, inconsistency in experience from app to app can be hurting your brand equity. And the reason for that is that when your customers interact with your brand in different settings, the difference between the online experiences can effectively make it feel like they’re interacting with different brands from one experience to another. Their attention is split between the multiple brand experiences, because your organization is managing a house of brands rather than a branded house.

You want your customers to have one brand experience with you, not several. While each individual UX may be great, if they were consistent with one another, they could have a combined effect on your user. Instead of loving a particular experience with your brand, they begin to love your brand as a whole.

Create a consistent user experience across every channel and device with Entando.

When release cycles take weeks rather than months, your business is left unable to respond to the needs of your customers to deliver the modern and consistent online experiences they’re looking for. And simply put, bad UX loses you customers. So that’s why we built a platform that helps you get your ideas to market faster.

Entando is the leading micro frontend platform for building enterprise apps on Kubernetes.

With Entando, you can use customized blueprints to quickly create Kubernetes-native micro frontends and assemble them onto a single page or into a single site. And since these components are reusable, you can leverage them across multiple projects via the Entando Component Repository, reducing development time and making UX consistency much easier to implement.

Entando is open source with enterprise support. Begin developing on the platform today, and get a quote to see how we can help your business build better apps, sites, and portals--faster.