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Comment by pjlegato | Hacker News Reader

Having standardized design and widgets across all UIs makes it easy for a user to figure out what's going on by making your application look, feel, and work the same as all others. Anyone familiar with the general HIGs can just sit down and start using it with minimal hassle.

Having standardized design and widgets across all UIs makes it harder for a consumer to remember your brand. It's not sticky in their minds, visually speaking. Your application looks, feels, and works exactly the same as your competitors' applications. This has measurable impact on revenue, and it's bad for your bottom line.

Guess which one most businesses choose: easier to use, or better revenue?

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This sounds like the kind of stuff people can just say without evidence because it sort of sounds right but is unfalsifiable in practice.

In my experience, there is far more people that complain about inconsistent UI than those who care about your cute little corporate identity.

Also, not like we have these "color palette" thingies that we, UI designers, already use to establish branding without affecting usability. We have a lot of UI elements we can change their properties of without directly affecting usability like borders, elevations, distances (while maintaining good contrast and looking out for color blindness too). Design systems exist for a reason. Heck, every SaaS and product already has a sales page for marketing content that is entirely designed to drive sales, no need to introduce dark patterns (or invent new crazy patterns that solves an already solved problem) in the application. A lot of interaction has already been solved, I don't see why can't we automate the whole UI process with a given opinionated design system.

> Having standardized design and widgets across all UIs makes it harder for a consumer to remember your brand.

Not automatically. Only if you neglect all of the myriad other ways to make your application stand out. Standardized controls and layout do not have to mean that all applications look the same.

> Having standardized design and widgets across all UIs makes it harder for a consumer to remember your brand.

Hm, then why does Windows looks like Android ?

It doesn't?

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