Background/ Objectives: Consistency is recognition of the fact that it is easier to do things in a familiar context. Consistency makes software applications more comfortable to use the objective of the paper is to evaluate software consistency as an indicator of usability for social software's. Methods/Statistical analysis: A sample of 345 respondents was selected. The data was collected through the use of questionnaires and interview targeting mobile social users in 11 constituencies of former Rift valley province of Kenya. The researcher purposively sampled WhatsApp, Facebook and Twitter as software’s used in this study. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze the data. Findings: This finding indicated that that 30.1% of the respondents agreed that the interface is consistent in the whole application in Facebook, followed by 15.4% in WhatsApp while 4.3% agreed in Twitter. Regarding whether icons and images are consistent in the whole application, it was reported by 36.8% of the respondents to be consistent in WhatsApp while Facebook users confirmed 16.5% while Twitter users were 6.7%. The findings further indicate that the social software becomes more consistent its usability increases, the consistency of shortcut keys with the operations, consistency of color, type and fonts displays influence usability of the social software. The paper has provided insights that consistency is vital, software designers should consider it in the software development process. Improvements: there is need to conduct further studies on other social software to confirm if these results are in line with all social software.

Nelson Bogomba Masese, Simon Maina Karume (2018). Consistency as Indicator of Usability for Social Softwares. International Journal of Computer Engineering In Research Trends, 5(5), 148-154. Retrieved from http://ijcert.org/ems/ijcert_papers/V5I503.pdf

[1] Tovi Grossman, George Fitzmaurice, Ramtin Attar (2009). A Survey of Software Learnability: Metrics, Methodologies and Guidelines,CHI 2009 2009 Boston, MA, USA conference  university. Issues in Science and Technology, 22(1),pp 1–13.
[2] Auden, W. H. (2013). Menu Selection, Form Fill-In, and Dialog Boxes. Designing the User Interface: 
Pearson New International Edition: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction, pp223.
[3] Savery, C. (2014).Consistency maintenance in networked games (Doctoral dissertation).pp-60-62
[4] Tidwell, J. (2010).Designing Interfaces: Patterns for effective interaction design. "O'Reilly Media, Inc.".pp-50-54
[5] Goecks, J., Nekrutenko, A., & Taylor, J. (2010). Galaxy: a comprehensive approach for supporting accessible, reproducible, and transparent computational research in the life sciences.Genome biology,11(8), pp 86.
[6] Swartout, B., Patil, R., Knight, K., & Russ, T. (1996, November). Toward distributed use of large-scale ontologies. In Proc. of the Tenth Workshop on Knowledge Acquisition for Knowledge-Based Systems (pp. 138-148). 
[7] Matejka, J., Grossman, T., & Fitzmaurice, G. (2013, April). Patina: Dynamic heatmaps for visualizing application usage. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems ACM  (pp. 3227-3236). 
[8] Hashim, A. S., Ahmad, W. F. W., Nordin, S. M., & Jaafar, A. (2014). Usability study of free schools system for secondary schools in Malaysia. rIn User Science and Engineering (i-USEr), 2014 3rd International Conference on IEEE (pp. 198-203).
[9] Bollini, L. (2017). Beautiful interfaces. From user experience to user interface design. The Design Journal, 20(sup1), pp 89-S101.
[10] Bevan, N., Carter, J., & Harker, S. (2015,). ISO 9241-11 revised: What have we learnt about usability since 1998?. In International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction(pp. 143-151). 
[11] Nielsen, J. (1999). Designing web usability: The practice of simplicity. New Riders Publishing. 
[12] Issa, T., & Isaias, P. (2015). Usability and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). In Sustainable Design  Springer, London (pp. 19-36)..
[13] Gu, X., Gu, F., & Laffey, J. M. (2011). Designing a mobile system for lifelong learning on the move. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 27(3), pp204-215.
[14] Buxton, B. (2010).Sketching user experiences: getting the design right and the right design. Morgan Kaufmann publication.pp 89-90
[15] Shneiderman, B. (2010). Designing the user interface: strategies for effective human-computer interaction. Pearson Education India  pp 100-102.
[16] Kelders, S. M., Pots, W. T., Oskam, M. J., Bohlmeijer, E. T., & van Gemert-Pijnen, J. E. (2013). Development of a web-based intervention for the indicated prevention of depression. BMC medical informatics and decision making,13(1),pp 26.
[17] Johnson, J. (2013).Designing with the mind in mind: simple guide to understanding user interface design guidelines. Elsevier.pp-45
[18] Abuali, A. N., & Abu-Addose, H. Y. (2011). A Comparative Study Of Techniques Used For Evaluating Web Page Quality Of The Public Organizations In Jordan - Amman.  International Journal Of Academic Research,3(2).pp 56
[19] Wilson, C. (2013).User interface inspection methods: a user-centered design method. Newnes.pp 80-84
[20] Fu, K. K., Yang, M. C., & Wood, K. L. (2015). Design principles: The foundation of design. In ASME 2015 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference (pp. V007T06A034-V007T06A034). American Society of Mechanical Engineers pp 77 -80
[21] Gartenberg, D., Thornton, R., Masood, M., Pfannenstiel, D., Taylor, D., & Parasuraman, R. (2013). Collecting health-related data on the smartphone: mental models, cost of collection, and perceived benefit of feedback. Personal and ubiquitous computing,17(3), 561-570.
[22] Shafiq, M., Ahmad, M., & Choi, J. G. (2017). Public System Usability Analysis for the Valuation of Cognitive Burden and Interface Standardization: A Case Study of Cross-ATM Design.Journal of Organizational Computing and Electronic Commerce pp 54-67
[23] O'Neil Jr, H. F., Ni, Y., Jacoby, A., & Swigger, K. M. (2013). Human  benchmarking for the evaluation of expert systems. Technology Assessment in Software Applications, pp13.
[24] Ritter, F. E., Baxter, G. D., & Churchill, E. F. (2014). Methodology III: Empirical Evaluation. In Foundations for Designing User-Centered Systems Springer, London.
 (pp. 353-380). 
[25] Klöckner, A., Pinto, N.,  Lee, Y., Catanzaro, B., Ivanov, P., & Fasih, A. (2012). PyCUDA and PyOpenCL: A scripting-based approach to GPU run-time code generation. Parallel Computing, 38(3),  pp 157-174.
[26] Beatty, K. (2013). Teaching & Researching: Computer-assisted language learning. Routledge  pp 124-129.
[27] Jalon, J., Robert, J., & Paterson, T. (2012). U.S. Patent No. 8,185,839. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office pp 67-78
[28] Shneiderman, B. (2010). Designing the user interface: strategies for effective human-computer interaction. Pearson Education India.
[29] Sandip Sharad Shirgave, Prof. S. V. Pingale, Prof. A. A. Rajguru, Prof. N. M. Sawant," Access Control Methodology for Online Social Network" International Journal Of Computer Engineering In Research Trends Volume 2, Issue 5, May 2015, PP 293-295 , ISSN (Online):  pp 2349-7084
[30] Neil, T. (2014).Mobile design pattern gallery: UI patterns for smartphone apps. " O'Reilly Media, Inc."pp 45-49
[31] Krejcie, R.V., & Morgan, D.W.(1970). Determining Sample Size for Research Activities. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 30, pp 607-610
[32] Masese  Nelson, Samwuel Mbugua,  Geoffrey Muchiri (2016). Research data for PhD thesis.