When it comes to planning the early stages of a website, it is important to challenge our assumptions. By doing just that over the course of my career, I have arrived at several important, but uncommon views. In this article I want to focus on one of the most controversial:
“Innovation” is not always a good thing for web design.
I believe that getting this wrong results in a lot of wasted effort in web development teams.
Fortunately, there are some savvy UX people who think so, too. We should heed their advice, especially in the early stages of a project before we go down a misguided path due to lack of good information, sound principles, and most of all, outside verification.
In fact, Jakob’s Law, named for Jakob Nielsen of the User Experience think tank Nielsen Norman Group, states:
“Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.”
Let’s be real: true innovation is rare
Innovation is a word that gets thrown around a lot, but it is not a term I use lightly.
I have had some creative successes in my career, and a few might even be considered innovative if we really narrow the context. But the truth is, that unless you are an inventor or researcher, or you have a lot of time to tinker, true innovation simply cannot make up the majority of what you and your team are even trying to do. If you are an inventor or researcher, as a percentage of your work, true innovations are rare. Even the symbol we see for a new idea is ironic. How many thousands of trials did Edison’s team make before finding the working filament for the light bulb?
Often, to keep up appearances, what we get is smoke and mirrors masquerading as innovation. Directors and managers are some of the worst offenders at this charade. They ask their staff to “get creative” and “come up with something.” This is rarely because they are looking for flashes of brilliance. They themselves are unprepared, so they expect “creative” people to just pull things out of thin air. You know who you are. The result? People dig through the dustbin of old ideas and try to revive them for a new project. This is hardly innovative.
If true innovation is exceptionally rare, and rehashing ideas is innovation fraud, then what should we be doing? We should be learning from others that are getting it right.
Master and apprentice
For generations before the modern era, learning a trade always meant hands-on, practical experience only available by apprenticing to a master.
While some trades still retain this practice, many white-collar jobs are sadly lacking this invaluable part of professional development. That is not to say that students do not spend time as interns. I have personally worked alongside dozens of them. But what is often lacking is the tradition of mentorship and the transfer of skills. Interns are usually treated as low-level contractors, and the relationship is almost always aloof on both sides.
I think what people have forgotten is the power of a true working partnership. They are worth seeking. Is it so hard to relate what we think about every day of our working lives? Taking a few minutes a day to mentor a more junior team member might result in you finding a true protégé. Is it so hard to ask a more senior team member, “how did you come up with that?” The answer might save you years of searching on your own.
What do we mean by “best in class” examples?
Perhaps you haven’t cultivated your network, and you don’t have a mentor. Fortunately, there are other ways to learn. One is through researching existing websites that we find relevant or inspiring, often termed best in class examples.
Best in class research is common practice with several teams I have worked on. Any amount of research can be helpful, however, teams often don’t go deep enough to really define what best in class is and whether the examples are relevant to the project at hand.
To get meaningful examples, we need to define what we’re looking for in the first place.
Directing your search
As covered in my book Building Better Sites, it is extremely important to get input from your key stakeholders as early as possible to direct the efforts of your team. Targets may change, but positioning as many of them as accurately as possible can save massive amounts of misplaced energy.
Let’s take as our example an ecommerce site that sells household goods for kitchen and bath. The site features department-store quality and style but provides alternatives to big-name brands. For this brand, best in class does not mean limiting your search to other kitchen and bath ecommerce sites. You need best in class examples, regardless of their sources, for any aspect of the project you are trying to solve.
Many smaller sites within a specific industry have poor functionality, substandard photography, or confusing categories. If you stop after looking at sites for other kitchen and bath goods and say, “well, it’s ‘best in class’ for kitchen and bath sites,” you can expect mediocre results.
You can do much more to make your brand stand out. You can nudge the industry in the direction you want it to go. Expand your search to other kinds of sites, even other industries. You may find better user experience or categories within the same kinds of listings on Amazon, or better photography techniques on sites for luxury goods or beauty products you can adopt for your own site.
It is also important to consider the marketing needs of your brand, and do research that supports the entire customer journey.
For example, If you generate most inbound traffic through social media, then you should be considering more than just the website components and pages, but the broader integrated experience, looking at how the social content relates to the site.
The competitive comparison, step-by-step
There are many variables that you need to consider when doing early stage research. While the format and content of sites may vary from one industry to another, there are standards that apply to every website project.
In Building Better Sites, you will get insider information on how top agencies and Fortune 500 clients win at market analysis, competitive comparison, and the website research discussed in this article. There are even worksheets included that simplify the process and give you an easy points system to see clearly what works and what doesn’t. Download your copy.