EECS 298-11: CAD Seminar Wednesday, January 17, 1996, 5pm 531 Cory Hall, Hogan Room The Case AGAINST User Interface Consistency Jonathan Grudin Information and Computer Science Department University of California, Irvine The most frequently repeated interface design guideline is "be consistent." We are all annoyed by unmotivated inconsistencies. In this presentation, the audience is asked to solve several real design problems that suggest that the goal of interface consistency is more complicated than it may seem. Consistency is at times unworkable or counterproductive, and can direct attention away from users and their work. When users' work is not well-understood, consistency on some dimension may improve an interface, but a better understanding of the users' work sometimes leads to a less consistent but better design. This work has implications for design based solely on measuring and manipulating interface elements: automated interface generators, consistency checkers, and so forth. A focus on formal properties of interfaces can conflict with "user-centered" design. Jonathan Grudin worked for 5 years as a software engineer at Wang Laboratories and for 3 years at MCC in Austin, Texas. He received a Ph.D. in 1981 at the University of California, San Diego, under Donald Norman. After two years at Aarhus University in Denmark, in 1991 he joined the faculty of the Information and Computer Science Department at the University of California, Irvine, where he is now Associate Professor. He serves on the editorial boards of several human-computer interaction journals, and is co-editor of the recently released second edition of Readings in Human-Computer Interaction. Upcoming seminars: Jan 24: Doron Peled, AT&T Bell Laboratories "New Trace Theory Results Applied to Model-Checking" Jan 31: Vigyan Singhal, UC Berkeley Feb 7: Patrick Scaglia, Cadence Berkeley Labs Feb 14: Scott Hauck, Northwestern University Feb 21: Alex Saldanha, Cadence Berkeley Labs