Common Practice vs. Best Practice

These days there are hundreds of ways to keep up with the latest in the design world. There are blogs to follow, feeds to subscribe to, newsletters to read, and dribbble to peruse. It is so easy to find inspiration and examples for almost any problem you are trying to solve.

I see a problem with that though. It is to easy to come back to the average. To fall into the trends and "best practices." Who says that something is a best practice just because it has been posted about often? Just because some big name designer or company does something doesn't mean it's the right solution (remember Facebook and HTML5 orApple and Skeuomorphism).

It is easy for beginners to fall into the trap of designing the way they think it should be. It is a form of peer pressure. By looking at all of the examples out there it makes it even harder to stray from the standards on a new design.

I'm currently working on a new task management app (yeah, I know). I started playing with the visual design the other day and began to show it to people. I got pretty good responses. People understood what the app did and what everything meant. I was feeling pretty good about myself and my design, and then I showed it to my girlfriend. She looked at it and gave me the most honest feedback yet. She said, “this looks great and I understand what the app does, but it looks just like everything else.”

Initially I brushed this off and said to myself “it's like that because that is the best way to solve the problem.” However I’m glad she said that, it made me began to question the “Why” behind my design choices. Was I actually thinking about solving my problem or just blending a bunch of things I liked in other apps and putting them into mine?

To be honest, I don't know.

What I do know is that all of the blogs, newsletters and designers I follow are influencing my design decisions. For better or worse, they are going to be in the back of my mind throughout the design process. For the most part, they influence in a productive way. However, it is to easy to take what is published around the Internet as “best practice.” As designers, we have a responsibility to our users. We have to make sure that we aren’t backing our design decisions with the reasoning that “everyone is doing it that way.”

Obviously there is no reason to re-invent the wheel every time. That is not what I’m arguing for. I also am not arguing that there needs to be less sharing in the design industry. Instead, I argue that we share and collaborate responsibly. That we pay attention to common practices, but never follow these practices blindly.

What is a Designer Founder?

That's a tough question. It is tough because neither "designer" nor "founder" are well defined in the own respects. Let’s start with the founder part.

Found•er - noun

a person who establishes an institution or settlement.

The dictionary definition of founder is pretty simple. You establish an institution or settlement. For a long time I thought of company founders as the brains behind the vision. Those individuals who were sitting in the coffee shop that one day. The ones who scrambled for the pen and napkin to simple jot down their grand idea so they wouldn’t forget it. But by the dictionary definition, that is not always the founder. The definition implies that you have to take action on it. You have to actually establish it. That’s why you see co-founder after co-founder. There is a distinct difference between an idea man and a founder.

Now what about designers?

De•sign•er - noun

a person who plans the form, look, or workings of something before its being made or built, typically by drawing it in detail

I think that designers are often mistakenly boxed in as “visual” creatives. Someone that sits in the corner with their head in the clouds and doodling their ideas. While yes this is one type of designer, it is important to remember that it isn’t the only kind. In my humble opinion, being a designer is all about a state of mind.

You, as a designer, sit back and think. You think about how to form the new process in your manufacturing plant. You think about how the company hierarchy should be structured. You think about that new product your competitor just put out and how you will respond. You think about that coffee mug that holds your morning cup of joe. You most importantly think about why. Why is it that way? Why is the handle shaped like that? Why do we do X before Y? Why are there executives, executive directors, vice presidents, directors, and so on and so on? Why do we do the things we do them? 

In a meeting the one with the design mind asks “why?”. They are also the first to ask “why not?”. To have the courage to speak up against the status quo and truly question the motive behind any decision, process, or assumption is what it means to be a designer founder. That is why so many designer founders are successful with their companies. They may not have that shiny MBA, but they do have the wherewithal to question everything. 

That is what it means to be a designer founder.

What if digital buttons aged like physical buttons

Keyboards, phones, keypads, microwaves, the world is full of physical buttons. These buttons show wear and tear over time. You see your favorite combinations or those that you use often. They dirty over time, if you don't clean them, and you can see where your finger has been and where it hasn't. There is a sense of familiarity. You know how the button feels when you press it. Whether your "7" key sticks a little bit every once and a while. 

Our smartphones have taken that away from us. Your app icons are as clean and fresh as they were the first day that you added them to your phone. They look pristine, exactly the way the designer intended them. There is no way for someone else to know just how many times you open Facebook to check on your friend's lives. 

But what if there was. What if these icons dirtied over time. What if that Facebook icon on your phone started to look more and more worn every time you tapped it. Wouldn't that be odd...

24-Hour iOS free trial system

Recently there have been a few articles recently pointing out that the Top 20 grossing iOS apps now only include one paid application. How are these other applications making revenue, in-app purchases. When in-app purchases were first introduced in iOS it was somewhat utilized by games to allow a user to get ahead quickly. Now services that require a subscription can build a subscription into an in-app purchase. These are great sources of revenues for apps that lend themselves towards this type of model. However, what about all the apps that can’t use in-app purchases because they just don’t make any sense? Think of utilities or productivity apps. These developers are being almost forced by the market to cut their price to as close to free as the developers can withstand.

“Top 20 grossing iOS apps now only include one paid application”

A proposal for a 24 hour free trial system.

Allow developers of paid applications to let users try out their applications for 24 hours without having to pay. The ability to try out a product has already been proven before to increase sales and decrease the cognitive dissonance of consumers. This would be an optional implementation for the developer and could prove beneficial to apps that need to be played with to be appreciated.

Apps that have a sign up required could use demo data in the free trial in order to demonstrate the great ways their application can be used. This could turn into a 24 hour sales pitch for the developers.

We have seen the impact that in-app purchases made on the app store market. I think it is time we see how a free trial system would shake things up.