- Should you always follow best practices?
At our Q & A session during the August virtual conference,
an attendee asked when Jakob Nielsen feels comfortable,
deeming something a universal best practice.
Here's what Jakob had to say.
- Yeah, I don't necessarily think
it's a universal best practice,
but it would be like a prevalent,
a very widespread best practice.
And my kind of guideline for guidelines
or sort of rule of thumb for this
is that about 90% mark.
So if about 90% of the time and we do usability studies,
we see that something is difficult for users,
we will say, don't do that, or if about 90% of the time,
we see something really works,
well, we'll say do that,
and that means that you know maybe there's about 10%
of the cases where that thing that we say don't do
might work well anyway,
or the thing that we say do, do,
might not be the best thing to do, right.
So, but the thing is if you have 90% versus 10%,
if you think about your design, what are the probabilities
that you're on one or the other of those two groups?
It's vastly the biggest probability,
that you are in the group of the 90%,
not that you are in the group of the 10%.
It happens and people always think, oh, but I am special.
We are different, yeah and everybody is different.
Everybody is special in some degree,
but not to a big degree,
and so if you come up with a special,
a different way of doing things,
that is actually a little bit better
for your special circumstances
and this kind of general best practice.
Now, should you do it.
And I would, used to say no,
because the amount to which it's better
is swamped overwhelmed,
by the degree to which you cause confusion
and difficult for people coming with the expectations
caused by these majority of other cases.
And just remember particularly for talking of web design,
that most of the time
people don't use websites very intensively,
it's sort of a normal visit to a website
is about two minutes or something like that,
and it's not a lot of websites
where people go every day
or many times a day, there are few, right.
But mostly not,
and this means that they will not really be able
to ride up that learning curve,
now which is something we discussed
in the course on the human mind,
that people will tend to learn things by repeated exposure.
But if they don't have repeated exposure,
then they don't tend to get better and better
at knowing that exact new thing you invented,
and that means they will not get to a stage
where it actually is better.
Now, contrary roll this back.
Maybe you're in a situation
where people use something repeatedly
and maybe every day and very frequently,
that would often be the case
for maybe internal enterprise product type of situations,
or maybe some really major websites as well.
Well, then you can more assume
that people might be able to ride the learning curve
and actually learn something special
or optimize for your circumstances.
But that would be the exceptional case,
and also even then
remember that people don't get to the expertise stage
without passing through
the beginner or learning stage first,
and so if you do something where people do have to learn
because it's not the general best practice,
I would really strongly recommend
doing a lot of usability testing under learnability
because that could be an impediment for a lot of people,
and they may just go away
and never reach the level of expertise.
Now okay, so the question was about
when will deem something the best practice.
There's also cases where there's no kind of majority
or sort of common rule.
There's also cases where there's two things
that are half the time.
This is best half the time, that is best.
Well, then we'll have to say that,
or sometimes maybe something is like two thirds
of the cases best and one third of the cases,
some other thing is better.
Well then you still can't just say well,
do the thing that's two thirds of the cases is true.
You have to say, well, sometimes do this A,
that's about two thirds of the time and sometimes do B
and under these criteria or circumstances
will help you decide whether you're on A or you're on B,
and if you don't know anything,
well, then you do A the one that's two thirds of the time,
because that's after all
probabilities are with you in that case,
but try to determine
which of the two buckets you're in, right.
But I think there's a lot of cases
where we don't have to do that
because honestly, it is something that is established
at most of the time, as I said about 90% maybe,
most of the time there are certain things
that do actually work best in interactive design
because it's driven by the combination of human nature
and the nature of the computer, the nature of the beast,
the nature of the internet, that certain types of things
tend to work well under those conditions,
and also given the current state of technology too.
Obviously, there's certain things that we could dream about,
that might be nice if only we had something we don't have.
Well, in that case, well, we don't have it.