Good Experience - The Page Paradigm
More experience-based guidelines from Mark Hurst. He re-iterates a point he made in 1999 that he called "The Page Paradigm". It goes:
On any given Web page, users will either...
- click something that appears to take them closer to the fulfillment of their goal,
- or click the Back button on their Web browser.
I think this is a simple observation that is easy to forget in design for usability. This guideline was something that I hadn't considered:
Consistency is NOT necessary. For years, students of UI and UX have been taught that *consistency in the interface* is one of the cardinal rules of interface design. Perhaps that holds in software, but on the Web, it's just not true. What matters on the Web is whether, on each individual page, the user can quickly and easily advance the next step in the process.