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or worse still, more consistent So you believe that consistency among UI screens should take a backseat to usefulness? I agree with this but I know there are a

• damncabbage 15y ago
  Consistency is only a means to an end. That end can be a net positive, but I think pg is alluding to consistency for the sake of Google's convenience, rather than the convenience of its users.
• j_baker 15y ago
  I'd argue that a consistently poor interface is preferable to an inconsistently well-designed interface. I can get used to a poorly-designed UI if I only have to learn how to do so once. It's when I have to learn different ways to do the same thing that it becomes annoying.
• bane 15y ago
  There's different kinds of consistency though. Make everything use the same palette? That's a kind of consistency. Make everything use the same interaction design? That's a kind of consistency. Years ago I had to use a piece of visualization software that was designed around consistency in the interaction model for the software. It sounded nice, but what it meant was that where there was intersection in the interaction models between visualizations it worked well, but where there were differences they either chose to just not implement that function, or bury it in some menu somewhere. It was infuriating to know that a particular kind of visualization should offer a certain feature (like finding the average on an axis of a scatter plot), but because some other completely different visualization (a semantic graph) didn't have such a concept they just simply left it out.