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For example, think about the number of products you use that include one
or more of the following: login, purchasing, comments, rating systems, order history, inventory management, or user-generated content.
Do you expect that every single login experience gets redesigned completely
from scratch in a vacuum? Of course not! It would be annoying if they
were, since each new version would almost certainly differ just enough to
make things confusing. Having design standards for things like logging in
makes a lot of sense for both users and designers.
However, this tendency to fall back on patterns, or just to copy whatever
Apple/Amazon/ Facebook is doing, can cause some problems, especially for
startups. There are a few big reasons why you shouldn’t just adopt another
company’s solution without serious consideration.
They May Not Want Exactly What You Want
Companies have hidden agendas. But their agenda is not always your
agenda, which means that their optimal design is not your optimal design.
And if you think that they’re always optimizing for the best user experience,
you’ve lost your damn mind.
Want an example? OK! Have you ever purchased an item and been opted
in to receiving email deals from the company’s partner sites? As a user, who
likes that? Who thinks that’s a great user experience? Exactly.
Then why do companies do it? They do it because they have made the business (not UX) decision that they make more money by opting people into
partner deals than they lose by slightly annoying their customers. That’s a
totally reasonable calculation for them to do.
Now let’s say your biz dev person comes to you and says he wants to add
that feature to your checkout process because he has a partner lined up who
is willing to pay for the privilege of getting your users’ email addresses. He
says it will be OK to add the feature because other big companies are doing
it, so it must make money.
But you have no idea how much money they’re getting for making their UX
worse. You have no idea of the number of users they may be losing with this
practice. And even if you did know their numbers, you can’t decide whether
this feature is the right business decision for you until you know what those
numbers are going to be for your product.
In an ideal world we could always just choose whatever made the best possible user experience, but realistically, we make these kinds of business/
UX trade-offs all the time. They’re inevitable. Just make sure that you’re
making them based on realistic estimates for your product and not on the
theory that it’s right because a bigger company is doing it.
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