UI Consistency Project
To ensure consistency of UI standards in casino management product suite.
situation
This project involved maintaining UI consistency across all apps of the casino management product suite. It was a joint effort by UX and products teams and is being successfully implemented.
task
My job is to oversee all products consistency and document discrepencies found into a demand request.
action
My job is to oversee all products consistency and document discrepencies found into a demand request.
Why consistency?
It stemmed from the need to have a UI standards consistency to aid in the design and development of multiple apps that were part of the same product suite. A consistency UI guideline doc was created and maintained as we went along designing several apps and adding new components.
Process
I was part of a team that created and maintained these standards. This was an initiative that saw several parties coming to the table to uphold the standards and question anytime they saw a deviation.
The document was created by the UX in agreement with business analysts and product owners. Once created all the parties were to ensure strict compliance to the UX standards both in design and development.
High level items that the standards doc included
Standardized user task flows
Landing page layout
Details page layout
Setup Wizard layout
Form Layout, etc
As much as we tried to uphold the standards there were times when we felt that the existing components were falling short of delivering the best user experience. As we went along we realized that one solution does not fit all but tweaks were needed to improve upon a solution to address the context at hand. It was challenging to have debates and discussions around acknowledging exception cases where it made more sense to have custom design to achieve better optimization of user flows.
Landing Page consistency for desktop
To aid in achieving consistency when it came to the look and feel, the mandate was to use material design guidelines and polymer as it provided predefined UI components. The initial idea was to design apps to work on phones and material design has standardized language for it. On implementation, there weren't enough desktop UI components that would make the apps easier to use. It did not scale automatically to mobile as expected. Dev effort was spent in creating additional components custom to our needs.
Landing Page consistency for mobile
Additional custom components created were
Search results
Search filters
Horizontal scrolling tables
Drag and drop
Charts and graphs
Expandable cards
Login dialogs
Rich text editing
Result
Consistency project is of great value as a tool to adhere to UX standards and deliver familiar and trustworthy user experience. It is good to consider the fact that one size does not fit all and exception cases need to be acknowledged to further optimize user task flows.
