What is best practice for consistency across different products?

We have a debate in the organization (a small startup) on what should be consistent across our two web based products. However, the target user group is different for each product and the use cases are completely different, e.g. use cases are for a different specialty and content.

What are the best practices for consistency across products? Especially if they are different user groups?

We've had internal debates on keeping all of our products the same layout, same font styles, widgets, behaviors, etc. However, since the users and use cases are completely different, I have promoted different layouts for each app (vs a uniform) because one layout cannot meet the needs of the two user groups. But keep the brand consistent across.

Consistency defined by the following from smashing ux design:

• Info Architecture / Layout


• Fonts, colors and styles


• Behavior Consistency: Pattern reuse


• Behavior Consistency: unified nomenclature, reuse

Answer

There are many different levels of consistency that are applicable in UX design, so you need to define what the goals are and align the strategies so that you can get consistency where you need it, and help differentiate the experience where required.

For example, from the business perspective you could be talking about the brand consistency and identity that is linked to the company or organisation. The brand consistency is generally on a visual and content level, but it sets the general look and feel for the products and services under the brand. A very large organisation could have more than one brand (one of which is the corporate branding of the organisation), so there needs to be a high level strategic business decision on how the brands relate to each other.

From the design perspective you are probably talking about the visual, content and interaction design consistency. Some of the consistency comes from the underlying technology used to build the products or services, so ensuring that there is a solid and adaptable frontend development platform and minimizing the impact of legacy systems will go a long way to ensure that there are as little constraint in creating a uniform design and development guideline for your suite of products and services.

From an individual product perspective you are looking at the overlap and cross-section of users for the different products and services with respect to the brands (if applicable). I think this is where the biggest different will come from, but more so from the presentation layer of the visual perspective (colours, logos, fonts, etc) rather than the underlying content and interaction that are derived from a common design framework.

I usually encourage the practice of maintaining a series of documents that outline the purpose and relationship between the standards and guidelines developed for the company, so that these types of questions can be answered by UX designers and developers working on different projects.