Being the analytical and critical person that I am, I can’t help spotting inconstancies in certain app interfaces. I consider consistency one of the most important elements of simple and powerful interfaces and a certain company shares that opinion.

That’s why Apple released the Human Interface Guidelines for designing apps and releasing them in the appstore. The HIG feature aspects of designing interfaces for iPhone apps, you might have never thought of. But more importantly it contains almost every rule Apple made during the design of the standard native apps.

As a hardcore iPhone user, I have jailbroken my iPhone so I can use it for certain things Apple has forbidden. Releasing apps on cydia means that the developer is not limited to Apples public apis, and can do whatever the hell he wants.

But added value does come at a price. A loss of user experience that is.
A lot of the developers that release apps on cydia are actually programmers that have no experience in designing an interface. And it shows.

Take PdaNet for example. A great app, that does exactly what its supposed to do. But can it do any better, I reckon it can.

Let’s have a look at the PdaNet interface. There are already a few things that have caught my eye. The ? icon in the down left corner and the Settings button in the down right corner. The buttons do exactly what you’d expect them to do.
The ? icon links to a website which features information about PdaNet and the Settings button goes to the, well, settings view.

Great huh? Well, yeah but not really.

What if the developers of PdaNet would’ve looked a bit better at other, maybe apple designed, iPhone apps. The ? icon would actually be an i icon and the Settings button would be a  Bar Button Item, probably in the top left corner on an UINavigation Bar.

The PdaNet interface would then look a bit like this;

Already looks a lot better doesn’t it? The app suddenly makes a lot more sense, even though it did the same thing in the original. Minimal changes make a lot of difference, especially if those changes make sure that the user can expect the expected.

Consistency in button or label placement is not the only thing that bothers me, there are more examples.

iBluetooth, you may call it an app from heaven. Having the ability to share files over blue tooth suddenly feels like something really special. But that’s not the only “special” thing about this app. It is the first app I came across that has a quit button. Yes, a button that does exactly the same thing as the home button.

So let’s say you just shared some holiday pictures with your friend and wanted to go back to springboard. You’d just press this very nice red button in the top left corner and there you have it! Springboard.

That actually sounds like something useful. But there are different scenarios I can think of. Let’s say you’re uploading this 100mb video you just made with Cycorder to your computer, but wonder what that awful looking button does. You decide to press it, boom! The app quits and heads back to Springboard. Darn..

Even though that button added value to the user experience, you could now quit the app without pressing an actual button, it was not consistent with the HIG.

So there you have it, two examples of inconsistency in iPhone interface design. I’m pretty sure there are way more bad apps out there, but I just want this to be a message to all indie iPhone programmers out there.

Please note that I only changed some consistency errors and not completly revamped the PdaNet interface. There are way more things wrong with this interface, but this article is only about consistency in iPhone app interfaces.