During the product design process choices need to be often made with regards to navigation methods, color schemes and interactions amongst others. Sticking to established best practices is a good thing. For some designers such best practice is something that they studied in university, for others it could be something that the corporate style guide has clearly laid out.

As new trends get established on the web there is an aspiration on the part of the designer and also sometimes the wider stakeholders to see if or how they could be adapted within their product. It isn’t too uncommon to hear from stakeholders – I really like how you can filter and search for products on Amazon, Ebay why can’t we do the same for our website ?

What is more worrying is the attempt by Web Designers to explain away/justify design solely based on its apparent use by top brand named or trafficked websites.  “Amazon/BBC/CNN/Ebay are using it , they probably have spent thousands of dollars doing market research and usability studies, so I think its perfectly fair for us to use it as well”.

I don’t completely dismiss this argument. The pace of technological change means that there are now new and different ways in which one can interact with a website. Looking at a top branded website for leadership/inspiration seems like a completely sensible thing to do. However, I would like to point out to a few pitfalls in following this strategy

1. Know your audience -What matters most is not where your source your design ideas from, but whether your design works for your audience. It is great to introduce social features such as “sharing” within your product but lets not do it because everyone else is doing it. Lets do so because our customer on seeing the design tell us that,  “Yes !  this is a great feature and I can see myself using it”
2. Experient! – but be Agile - Designer often get back to me and say , but it will take 1/2 a day to implement, can’t we just implement it and see if it works. I think experimenting with new design concepts is a great idea! However, understand the risks to your customers and have a well defined exit criteria to roll back design ideas if they seem like they are not having the desired effect. If there is no clear exit criteria, you run the risk of overtime being left with a bloated product.
3. Your inspirations could change – Unless you have an inside view or verifiable information on why a certain design has reaped rewards for a company don’t assume that such is the case and not subject to change. A end result rarely provides information about the problem it was supposed to have solved.

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!