Efecte Blog

Do you know the saying ‘Stuck in a rut’? That is, living boring lifestyle that never changes. Mark Twain used this idiom in his famous speech about consistency.

There are those who would misteach us that to stick in a rut is consistency–and a virtue; and that to climb out of the rut is inconsistency–and a vice.

- Mark Twain, Consistency speech, 1887

He was talking about the misunderstandings of the word and how it was understood at that time as unchanging or immovable. The world has changed a lot from Twain’s times, but still consistency if you consider it as following processes and rules is still considered a beast of burden.

Cornerstones of consistency

Inside large companies there is a plethora of processes that you are obligated to follow just for process sake.  Mostly you are told to stick in a rut and follow the defined process. There is no feedback loop and no improvements done. This rigidness for the sake of consistency all around the company makes the processes the beasts. It is not the processes that are the beasts, but the company’s ability to react to change via the processes.

On the other hand, in smaller companies the lack of processes can be the thing causing problems. Employees have their own ways of working and have defined their own processes. And typically as you don’t need to inform anybody about the change in the process besides yourself. You end up using different “process” all the time. There is also another word for this: ad-hocking. Twain would probably call it being so much outside of the rut that you cannot even see the rut anymore.

Consistency is one of the cornerstones of good usability. Usually in this context, consistency is considered of being something that the users see and feel from user interface perspective, like user interface components, layouts, and visualization. Consistency in user experience can be extended to include also what the users need and what they do not need. This requires a lot of different activities – like market research, analysis of buyer and user persona, definition of use cases or user stories, prototype building, iteration over the actual product design – just to mention a few. I believe that in order to achieve consistency in these, following of defined processes is vital.

If you have good process that guides your work and truly makes your work easier, it is much more probable that you will also follow it. If you have chance via defined feedback loop like retrospectives to bring forth shortcomings in the process and even change the process to fix these problems, it is very likely that you will follow it.

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Efecte’s blog team will now take a well-deserved summer leave. Have a consistently inconsistent summer and see you again with new topics in August!