Too many chiefs

Elyse Sanchez, Monday, April 9, 2007 @ 3:27 pm

I’ve recently been working on a handful of websites whose philosophy is directly derived from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s observation that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” What these bedeviled sites have in common is a decentralized structure in which many content managers contribute information in many variations. Although this is generally a practice associated with corporate intranets, a recent project of mine involved a large consumer website.

Generally, the standard way to at least encourage—and hopefully, ensure—consistency is to develop a limited set of page templates and a detailed Style Guide that spells out the global and local guidelines. However (and this is especially true on intranets), these guidelines often become a challenge to the originality of the technically savvy, who with some knowledge of HTML or similar tools, can often subvert the norm to create their own, original layouts.

Intranets pose an interesting question regarding site-wide consistency, because in most cases, users probably will not be navigating across the entire site, focusing on their vertical (Marketing, IT, etc.) and a short list of general tools and resources, such as timesheets and travel arrangements. With that assumption, do the unique demands of the vertical trump the restrictions imposed by a design that carries through sitewide?

There are relatively harmless variations and those that not only make the “mini-site” hard for its core users, but cripple the usability of the site as a whole. In the former category, I would place some visual design decisions (e.g., use of images or not). But I’ve struggled with sites in which the navigation scheme changes from area to area, the disappearance and reappearance of global navigation, and shifts in terminology, where one concept can have several names. Individual content managers should design locally, but think globally.

user experience design

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