As more and more applications go cross-platform, users are sometimes presented with software that they can tell was simply “dressed-up” on/for their platform of choice, not actually thought out with it in mind all the way. Does your application follow the platform or does it follow itself?

The user interface design of any application is hard. But once that design is more or less agreed upon, many developers do not bother fine-tuning it for the end-platforms and just go for the wholesale approach. They argue that consistency in the application itself is the most important thing. This assumes that the original design is completely clean and uninspired by any of the target platforms, which in real life turns out not to be quite true. Even for software that is aimed at multiple platforms from the start, the UI paradigms of some platform slip into the design by virtue of designer preference. Or, worse, the paradigms from multiple target platforms get mashed together, and more is definitely worse in this case¹.

Jakob Nielsen summed this up eloquently in regard to the OK/Cancel button pairing, one of the most wide-spread errors in cross-platform UI design:

• Windows puts OK first
• Apple puts OK last
If you’re designing a desktop application for one of these two personal computer platforms, your choice is easy: Do what the platform owner tells you to do.

I would think this advice is obvious enough that it would not need to be brought up, yet both as a developer and as a user I know how often it is ignored. The feeling I get, at the bottom-line, is that the application I am using thinks of me as a second-class citizen. Because it is all about respecting your users — the people that pay for your product — and making them feel comfortable in your application, and ignoring the basics comes off as arrogance. On the premise of Keeping It Simple, the last thing I want to do is remember that your application reverses the order of OK/Cancel when all the other 100+ applications on my system do it right. Let us not even begin to think about keyboard shortcuts. Follow the damned Interface Guidelines that the platform designers have put out for this very reason.

There is cost associated with researching these guidelines, just as there is cost in developing an application on platform X that does not feel like it belongs there and thus will not sell as well as it could. Almost certainly, one of your competitors has paid attention to the details and will succeed in attracting users to their product. Maybe in some cases utility trumps usability, though in others the two are tightly coupled and ignoring either is fatal.

This does not mean your application cannot have a distinctive feel to it². It is a matter of making your application usable by people that are on the platform you are targeting. Even multi-platform users will appreciate it. To ignore this is to say that “our application is the only one you are using so why should we care how you, the user are used to things?”

1. Linux is a particular and, sadly, unfortunate example, where applications often borrow from different UI toolkits altogether, throwing out completely any sense of consistency with the platform [↩]
2. Take a look at Firefox 3 beta on the Mac and on Windows [↩]