Perhaps an obvious statement. However, it’s important to realize that there are two different ways this manifests and can cause us to make bad decisions when creating or redesigning a site.
Don’t let your personal preferences dominate your decision making process.
You Are Unique
Too often, it’s natural to impress our personal preferences and frustrations on a web design. In our office, when it seems like we’re moving into this territory, we quickly fall back to a simple line: “show me the validating research.” We find this helps us to keep personal preferences out of the decision making process and really target a result that is backed up by experiences beyond our own.
Try to think through your visitor’s minds. What is their perspective, their starting point, their primary goals?
Especially with a plethora of studies and testing tools available, we find that there is almost always applicable data for substantive decisions; if there’s not, we recognize the high probability of it being a personal opinion.
When you have a frustration or a preference (even one you feel you can justify), it’s a good exercise to go through and find validating research. If that proves to be too time consuming (it often is, especially when you’re not immersed in the field already), take a step back and try to find an objective reason for your position. Here’s some questions you can ask yourself to help separate opinion from real issues:
- Are there a lot of other sites doing it the way I prefer it? What about those in the top 100?
- Is this an old web practice? A new one? We tend to like things we’ve learned, as well as novel ideas. Neither of these areas is inherently ideal.
- Does this contradict any digital psychology I know of?
- How does this relate to offline experiences I can correlate to web design? (Be careful to use this for introspection, not validation; you can prove just about anything anecdotally).