[OpenID] Is a consistent UX incompatible with customizable UI?

[SitG Admin]

Disclaimer: in this post I conflate UI with UX. Just noticed that as 
I was almost finished writing the message, and thought I'd clarify 
that I see a consistent UX as requiring a consistent UI, too.

Switching to a new UI shouldn't require coming up with a "perfect" 
new UI that everyone can accept. Different people will have different 
ideas of what constitutes a "good" UI, what's understandable, what's 
*comfortable*. If we try coming up with a single UI that suits "most" 
people, we'll leave some of them out, and either provoke ire by 
forcing users to switch to a UI that they don't like, or be 
ineffectual when users understand the new UI so poorly that they 
don't really get used to it, much less notice when the UI is suddenly 
inconsistent.

The tricky part with offering user-customizable UI (because it's all 
about the user, and because the user is presumably best-equipped to 
determine which UI they like best!) is being able to determine which 
UI they want *before* identifying them. Maybe an early step in the 
flow where the user selects their desired UI by some code-name?

I'm thinking that it doesn't matter whether all sites agree on a 
single UI to be consistent about; all we need is for a given UI to be 
consistent *per user*. If we emphasize the user-centricity, and ask 
sites to offer their users the *option* of going with any of the 
official, defined UI's (official so users can rely on being able to 
get the same UI from the defining code-name), users could hold a 
reasonable expectation of seeing the same UI wherever they might go 
on the web.

-Shade