In my current role as a team manager, I’ve paid particular attention to consistency across our application.  This currently means having consistent navigation and when you see a grid on one module that grid basically functions the same as other modules.  Another example occurring frequently in large web sites is multiple calendar controls each with slightly different look and feel.  In developing these applications over the years, I’ve noticed that applications that maintain a consistent look and feel are often perceived to be more user friendly (no one has to read the manual to use them), while having multiple features that are just a little bit different often creates a “clunky” feel.

With all of today’s various browsers the concept of consistency across browsers comes into play (pay attention, the real meat of the article starts now).  Shouldn’t someone using Internet Explorer have the same experience as a Firefox user?  I maintain that the experience shouldn’t be painful for one browser user while enjoyable for another.   One caveat, if you control the browser and version that users will be viewing the site (like an Line of Business intranet application) then all bets off.

What raised my ire to this cause?  Take a look at Today’s MSNBC site in the screen shots below.  I was wanting to look at the worst names in history (Harry Pitts seems to be winning).

Here’s a nice IE experience.  The only gotcha’ on this design is the scroll bar within scrollbars at some resolutions

The less than stellar FireFox experience involves minor overlapping of the navigation with the background DIV and makes the web site appear less than A1 quality.

The big ticket experience earned here?  It’s all in the quality… at the personal blog level, people tolerate lots of flaws, at the MSNBC.com level expectations are much higher.

Happy Programming.