Forum Discussion
Consistency or Flexibility?
I have a design conundrum and i thought i'd post it here to see how folks solve theirs.
I think consistency in design is a huge piece; symbols are a language and even placement, font size, typeface and formatting are all symbolic. Bold means something, so does the font size, the colour, etc.
Anyhow, i am working on a game for a course and in the game the learner is presented with a situation and a set of options to chose from. In some slides i am stuck with having 5 options (not my list to i can't really cull options, so it is what it is). When an option is clicked, a Confirm button comes up, and to make space for it, the text size of that option is reduced until the button is clicked.
On slides with only 3 options i have no spacing issue and can put the Confirm button under that option's text without having to reduce the text size to make space for it. In fact, i have enough space so it would look quite silly for me to do that.
But consistency is important...
In a case like this, would you choose consistency even when it gets a little silly, or do you let it slide and go with the context of the slide for something like this?
Consistency always wins out for me, anything to stop the user thinking about superfluous stuff.
That's kind of where I am at also, and usually I stick to my guns on this. In this case, I ended up changing the design to circumvent my dilemma because sticking to consistency just made some slides look so silly.
Thanks for your input, much appreciated. :)
