Standards, Patterns and Users

True to Steve Mulder’s book title, in an ideal world, “The user is always right.” It’s also true to form that we could look at a site and say you need to do this or advise you to organise your menu to fit in with an established pattern of best practice based on years of the industry setting a standard for how something is done. However, often these standards change depending on the user base, and so it is always good to do some research—whatever time you have. Always consider the impact a poor design for your digital product might have on your business overall.

Millennials, for example, use a different lexicon and expect to find different elements on a page to a baby-boomer—for example, they will likely expect to be able to engage with social media features readily. And then, a blue-collar employee may have a different vocabulary to a white-collar worker—it’s always about the audience and very often about testing the site with users in that domain. And then, it is also always about what the client wants to achieve—which may be visionary for example, and not correlate at all with best practice.

In a system designed to be cross-demographic but with a predominant slant towards blue-collar employees, the financial product we worked on defined words on the page in a sidebar because the aim in principle was to minimise the need for interaction—you don’t want people clicking off elsewhere to understand things on your site if it is their first time and there is page real estate available to help support the user’s understanding.