Creating consistency between products using research-driven UI guidelines

Abstract

User Interface (UI) guidelines, used across various enterprise products or applications of a company bring consistency and cohesiveness between them. This paper discusses the user research studies carried out to arrive at a minimum threshold of visual components required to help multiple products retain the perception of consistency between interfaces. These studies help identify which elements and which combinations of these elements can help build associations. Our results showed that among various UI components, background color, header-footer and button color were the most influential, in that order. We also studied how various combinations in the background color of the content area plus header-footer would lead to increase or decrease in association.