What the others said. And some more.
The notion of "best practices" is not new or ethereal, at least not in
the realm of design management, project management and related
disciplines. They constantly evolve and the term serves as an umbrella
for specific pedagogies. I like to spice it up a bit. In addition to
discussing best practices, I like to talk about better practices,
worse & worst practices, boring practices and dirty practices. Because
business rhetoric is boring.
In the world of IxD/IA/UX, the establishment of best practices (vs. no
practices or sloppy ones) seems implicit - especially within the
context of the codification of practices via literature (print & web)
and rhetoric (conferences, mailing lists, journals, beer talk, etc.).
In other words, most of the books that have been published on web
design, IA (hello, authors!) and so on over the ages are essentially
about the establishment or formation of "best practices." It's an old
term that can be applied to various disciplines.
Usability testing (in all its various forms) is a "best practice" vs.
no usability testing (or "practice"). Use of Mental Models might turn
out to be an ineffective best practice in a few years (and maybe
not)... Lazy implementations under the cover of "Agile" (in other
words, "fake Agile") could be "F-d practices." Joe Blow's Best
Practice might be My Nightmare. Oscar Madison's nightmare (uh, say,
establishing baseline PM procedures and actually following them) might
reflect Felix Unger's idea of a best practice. And so it goes.....
Within the process of interface design, I don't know if you can apply
the term "best practice" to the actual design output. For example, I
wouldn't use the term to describe design product. I wouldn't say, "The
use of left-aligned CSS pull-down menus is a best practice," in
general. (I might call it a common practice.) But I might say that
your use of design research best practices helped your UX person to
determine that the use of a left-aligned menu was best for your
client's user base.... I would never say that Johnny Quest's habit of
dancing to Culture Club songs while prototyping is a bad practice vs.
Race Bannon's practice of doing 100 squats and eating raw eggs with
jalapenos and whistling "Dixie" whilst sketching on his Wacom....
That's my take, anyhow.
-- Eric Swenson
++++++++++++++++++++++++++
: eric swenson
: swensonia inc
: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
On Jun 30, 2008, at 9:10 PM, Matthew Zuckman wrote:
People in my office seem to be obsessed with "best practices" lately
- a notion that seems a bit ethereal to me. After all, splash pages,
lead-based paint, burning witches, and other such concepts are now
obsolete (or at least frowned upon). In the past, I have tried to
steer people towards the idea that certain interfaces or features
may be a "standard practice," but I am wondering if patterns are now
the best evaluation tool.
Any thoughts?
./matthew
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