Different look and feel between administration and end user experience?

Question

Lets say we have an app that performs something like surveys. There are two primary types of users, administrative users who set up and build the surveys, (who are actually the customers), and the 'public' users being surved, who will also have accounts and profiles.

Here is my question. Considering how few views exist on the public end, and how different the function; is it appropriate to have a mildly different look and feel from the administrative areas? What kinds of value does this visual shift between the experiences hold?

Or should the two kinds of users get the same basic look and feel? Is there value to the two ends being visually consistent?

I caught myself preparing to go through the extra work of making a different look and feel for the public, but then realized there a good arguments on either side.

Answer 1

• In my opinion, your administrative user are going to be handful, compared to the end users who are actually going to take the survey, so I would say, concentrate more on the UX of the end users.

• Again building a custom UX for a handful of admins means doing a lot of extra work. Moreover the admins who as you said are the customers are looking at how the user would actually feel using your app.

• Normally the administrative users have a lot more tools / controls which the end users don't have. So having them in place for them, would anyway change the experience for them. So more control, more power, more authority is going to give them a different experience all together on the app.

• The basic look and feel should be same, I don't find much value in having it different for a handful of admins as I mentioned previously.

• And yes, there is plenty we can argue or discuss on having it differently or not, but this is entirely my opinion. I would go about with doing the aforementioned.

Answer 2

I tend to keep the look and feel consistent in the sense that (spurious example) the left of two buttons will always be the affirmative button, or the right, but never a mix.

Beyond that, the UI should focus on allowing the user to complete their workflow as painlessly as possible, where painlessly means accurately and quickly.

That could differ in your case for an end user and an administrator. Here's an example. I encourage people to test their common workflows by literally doing the workflow a thousand times. By common I mean workflows a user may be expected to repeat many times in a given session.

Here's an admin workflow "Click add survey question"->"Select survey question type"->"Enter survey question"->Click save"->"Click 'yes' on confirmation dialog".

Now do that one thousand times and you will find the user has clicked that end yes 998 times and no twice. Lose the confirmation dialog, make sure they admin can undo their changes later.

For the end user, who may only actually use the system once (ever! to complete one survey) having a yes no confirmation at the end would likely help.

Thematically you may want the admin suite to look more muted than the survey page an end user gets simply because the administrator may be looking at it for 3 hours straight. And as hinted at above, the admin user may well be repeating these operations many times, so keep them slick and consistent.

Also, let's not forget that answering the questions in a survey is not the same as creating the questions in the survey. Sounds painfully obvious, but if they survey can take a "other information" type text field for questions, you may not include a spell checker. For your admin pages, entering the text, I'd damn well insist on having a spell checker there. Same operation, entering text, different required result.