Don’t Go to the Moon in a Paper Airplane

Design patterns have limits. When you need to go to the moon, even the greatest paper airplane will not do.

Let’s say the typical need in our business is passing notes to a friend in the next room without using electronic devices. After a great deal of research, we’ve concluded that a paper airplane is the best design pattern to meet that need. We’ve iterated and perfected this paper airplane. The nose cone is sharp as a razor. The folds are crisp and precise. It makes a soft whoosh as it glides. It’s perfect.

One day the business team comes to us and says that we’re now going to go on a physical mission to the moon. Our first instinct would likely be: “Yes! We’re going to need a lot of paper.” 

But taking a paper airplane to the moon would be a rather poor user experience, especially the part about lacking oxygen or protection from the elements. 

To go to the moon, we need a rocket ship. And that’s a new pattern.

It’s useful for those of us who dream up, strategize and design tech products to remember that we place a higher premium on consistency than the people who actually use a product. That’s because consistency means different things to us than to the user. 

To us, consistency means efficiency. It’s a decision that’s been made once well, and now we don’t have to go through the churn of thinking about it again. We may be able to save cost in design or development. There’s even something about it that feels elegant, as if we’ve cracked the code on design by creating something that works universally.

This is good. We couldn’t possibly revisit every decision every time, and efficiency ultimately gets passed along to the client or end user through shortened cycle times and reduced cost.

But this utility only matters so long as it serves the end user. If no one wants to use the product, it doesn’t matter how efficient it was to design or build, and the elegance we proudly saw in a universal solution is invisible to the end user if they can’t get their needs met. 

To an end user, consistency’s main advantage is that it can make it easier to know what to expect. For example, if the delete button is always a circle with an x on the right in your system, you don’t have to think about it when you encounter a new screen. That sort of implicit training makes a system easier to use. But we have to know when to stop. No solution is a universal cure. 

Back in the real world, we recently encountered a situation in a project where the logical information density was dramatically different than in the rest of the app. We tried several designs using the established patterns - but it just wasn’t providing the user experience we wanted. Ultimately, we introduced a new UI element into a project. Because the need was significantly different (much lower information density) it made sense. That element won’t replace the standard way of doing things for this project, because most of the project has higher information density. But this is the optimal user experience for this feature, because it caters to the user first. It looks great, too.

Arriving at a beautiful solution required our design team having the courage to say “We’ve tried the normal pattern, but we think this situation is different enough from past situations that it warrants making an exception to the standard design pattern.” After we gave ourselves permission to make that call, a useful answer revealed itself and we could all see it was far better than any of the ‘standard’ options.

The moral of the story? Consistency is the right place to start, but it’s easy to overestimate the advantages when the need is different. The users of your system will not be taking a mental inventory of whether a given design is found elsewhere, as long as the path is clear, easy and safe.

If you’re having trouble solving a problem, consider if the need is different enough that it perhaps requires revisiting the standard solution. That new solution then becomes part of the pattern library for the future, so the next time you want to go to the moon, you’re ready to strap in and go. 

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