DeutschDistinguished computer scientist Ben Shneiderman compiled this tremendously insightful as well as practically useful list of The Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design distilled from his experience and a vast corpus of user interface design with consistency being the first – and arguably most important – of these principles.
More than 20 years ago, Joel Spolsky, of Stack Overflow, Microsoft Excel and Trello fame, also identified consistency as a fundamental principle of good UI design and argues for striving for an instantly recognisable UI as well as behaviour (i.e. UX) in applications, rather than reinventing the proverbial user interface wheel each time.