Consistency and its effect on Game Industry
AUTHOR
ALTHEA NGUYEN
PUBPLISHED
12TH JAN 2025
10 MIN READ
Introduction
Have you ever noticed why we go to the same restaurant, the same water shop or even the food truck down the winding alleys just to enjoy a dish? Yes! ! Because these shops carry flavours that our taste buds love. When cooking a dish, eateries or restaurants often follow a certain standard, which we often call it – Recipes! There are cases where restaurants change recipes, chefs or kitchen assistants have resulted in the loss of a few regular customers because they can no longer find the familiarity in the food they usually enjoy here. So, consistency is the key value of any product, brand or identity. This is just an example related to the food aspect. What about other aspects? We’ll dig deeper with the examples below.
What is consistency?
Consistency is an important principle in design, where design elements must follow certain principles to ensure ease of use, memorization, and understanding. Consistency is divided into two main types: internal consistency and external consistency
Internal consistency
Internal Consistency is simply understood as the consistency in the design of a product or group of products manufactured by the same company with the same brand.
You can visualize the internal synchronization in a simpler way through the menu bar presentation of Microsoft’s office application group including Word – Excel – Powerpoint. The group of content formatting features such as font style, size, and color are displayed synchronously on the icon, have the same arrangement on the menu bar, and they all have the same feature on all 3 applications.
For game apps, you can find internal synchronicity through the layout, color, and font style of the screens in the app. Everything will follow the game’s style guide system.
For example, the game Clash of Clans uses the same layout for different screens. The buttons of Clash of Clans also follow a certain style guide, specifically, the CTA button in use is blue and designed in a rounded rectangle.
External consistency
External consistency refers to established conventions within an industry or on the web at large, beyond an application or group of applications.
Jakob’s law states that people spend most of their time on sites other than your own, which means they carry their expectations from other sites when they visit yours. User contexts and patterns will be different on each site, so there’s still room for measurement and adjustment, but for the most part interactions should be in line with what people expect. When designing your app, focus on helping users achieve their goals as efficiently as possible instead of creating a unique interface that people will need to actively search for information.
In games like Battleland Royal, Brawl or LoL we easily notice that icons will follow a common convention like icons Home, Setting, Shop, Friend, Chat,… to players don’t have to waste time relearning something new.
Factors that need to be considered to ensure consistency
Visual consistency (style)
In a product in general or a product group of the same company in particular, it is necessary to ensure the consistency of color, font style and icon throughout the use process. Not only that, all images used in a website or app should be treated the same.
We should also avoid using different design styles for elements on different pages like the Game below. The OK button has a different design on each screen. A designer should not leave his users wondering if the difference in the change between these two buttons has any deeper meaning.
Page and button layout
Arrangement consistency is represented by the arrangement of display elements on a screen. More specifically, repeating elements such as navigation bars and CTA buttons or forms used on multiple pages. Regardless of the purpose of the form content, we should make sure the buttons and input fields are designed the same, placed in the same place on the screen, to avoid confusing the user.
Honkai Impact uses yellow for the call to action button and blue for the secondary button, with the main button arrangement going to the right of the secondary button. And such an arrangement occurs across all screens. This unity of layout will make it easier for players to understand as they perform the operation.
Functional consistency (behavior)
Functional consistency is demonstrated through designs that work the same way across the same product or group of products with the same brand. Clearly shown through the behavior of using items on the menu bar and buttons. Don’t give users confusion or unexpected surprises, let their actions follow “The principle of least surprise”, this will help The interface works the way the user expects it to be. Since most of us do not want to be suddenly changed in familiar behavior, this will lead to feelings of discomfort because things are not as we thought, it will affect the curiosity of people using for the application.
It is absolutely necessary that buttons with the same visual should perform the same function when clicked. For example, in the game Fortnite, although the arrow button ◀️ ▶️ has no text and label attached, but when placed in 2 different screens, players can still understand that this button is the same function.
Another example of functional consistency in Genshin impact, although the buttons have different text, the familiar visual still helps players recognize it with the same information sorting function.
Consistent with user expectations
Functional consistency is demonstrated through designs that work the same way across the same product or group of products with the same brand. Clearly shown through the behavior of using items on the menu bar and buttons. Don’t give users confusion or unexpected surprises, let their actions follow “The principle of least surprise”, this will help The interface works the way the user expects it to be. Since most of us do not want to be suddenly changed in familiar behavior, this will lead to feelings of discomfort because things are not as we thought, it will affect the curiosity of people using for the application.
It is absolutely necessary that buttons with the same visual should perform the same function when clicked. For example, in the game Fortnite, although the arrow button ◀️ ▶️ has no text and label attached, but when placed in 2 different screens, players can still understand that this button is the same function.
This is also quite widely applied in mobile games. Players not only play one game only, but they often play many other games, because of this they have an expectation that some features will be the same between games.
Do we use consistency in the right way?
The consistency goes along with usability
Consistency is a necessary property of the system, but trying to bring the designs into one form to create consistency in the system is a serious mistake that affects the development of the product and user experience as well.
The main purpose of design is user-centered design, creating products that are highly usable and accessible.
What if a design focused only on answering the question “Is what I’m designing consistent with other things we’ve designed (or others have designed)?” instead of answering the question “Is the thing I’m designing really available to the user?” then that consistency is meaningless to the users.
Design for coherence
If we put the design goal of consistency first, we are trying to create a system that is rigid to the needs of the user. User demand is not constant, but it changes over time, so the development must ensure flexibility. Consistency must ensure flexibility to be able to customize changes to suit the development and upgrade of the system.
A consistency system is relatively easy to achieve, but building one that works is a whole different story. The main goal of a design system is to create connections between designs and make room for change.
Consistency in a product must be balanced with usability and the end user’s goals. You have to learn, interact with your users to understand what their goals are.
Do we have to break consistency?
Do we need to neglect consistency and always break the rule? No.
We need to make our designs consistent to be more usable, easier to learn, and more intuitive.
However, that consistency must be used in the right place at the right time, and the consistency must be tied to the usability of the design. Does this consistency affect the usability and achievement of the user’s goals? – We need to ask ourselves when making the decision to apply consistency to our design.
According to an article by NNgroup titled “The Power Law of Learning: Consistency vs. Innovation in User Interfaces”, breaking design consistency is possible, but before you do that, you need to answer 3 questions for yourself:
1- Will the new design perform much better than the old?
2- Is it credible that users will be willing to try the new design again and again until they have learned it well enough to realize those long-term benefits?
3- Can you speed up learning?
As you see, you can’t answer these questions without knowing so much about your users’ knowledge and goals.
Final thought
It’s all about trade-offs and balances. The most important thing to know is when to break consistency and when to be consistent. Get to know your users, interact with them, and keep their goals in mind.