Design inconsistency can hurt usability

Part of the user experience is how well the site or application works and how easy it is to perform tasks. The design of the web site or application helps visually guide you in performing those tasks. So when then design throughout the site is inconsistent, you’d likely assume the usability would take a big hit. In most cases this is true but in rare cases, such as the case with American Express, my user experience didn’t suffer despite the handful of design variations.

The American Express homepage is probably the biggest culprit. I counted five different design styles alone, including multiple font usage and a disconnected footer. There are also little superfluous design elements that really don’t add to the experience. Luckily though they don’t really take away from it either. Flash is used for the brunt of the content, but it’s content they could do just fine with Javascript. Despite this, navigation is clear and logging in to pay bills (which is what I do from the homepage) is easy and clear.

Clicking Personal Cards in the primary navigation will take you to the following page. You’ll notice the design style changes almost completely and the page is centered, whereas the homepage is flush left. The only two elements that hold the site together visually is the logo and the top navigation, which is consistent throughout. The Personal Cards page looks like it was done more recently. In fact, it’s apparent that American Express updates parts of their site independent of each other.

Next up is the Travel page. It bounces back to flush left alignment and takes on a new visual design. Functionality between these pages is really well done and finding information is easy. The Travel page actually looks and works a lot like the section of the site where credit card bills are paid, which was just recently redesigned, so I’m assuming that this portion of the site is fairly new too.

Then we move on to the Small Business portion of the site. I give this section a bit of slack because American Express does advertise OPEN apart from their normal line of cards, so in a way they’re allowed to be separate entities. Out of all the visible sections the OPEN section, I feel, lacks the most.

The other two pages of the top level navigation on the American Express site are different from each other as well as from the previously mentioned pages. Typically, this type of inconsistency is frowned upon, however, American Express manages to maintain the user experience and still provide functional, well thought out means of accessing information and performing tasks. However, American Express should still work on design consistency.