How Best Practices Can Lead to Strategic Failure

Inevitably in any timeline- or budget-constrained project, someone will ask, “what is the best practice here?”

Usually this is in relation to some kind of blocker in a project – be it budget or personalities or opinions – driven either by a lack of strategy, or a lack of confidence in that strategy, to support confident decision making. And just as often, there is an honest desire to leverage what is already known about a given set of customer behaviors, user goals, or interaction designs, rather than reinvent the wheel.

When we examine carefully the meaning of Strategy, and its application to Experience Design, a clearer picture emerges:

Choosing to fall back on “best practices” to determine your optimal Experience Design consigns your product to mediocre performance, at best.

Just as often, it leads to a strategic failure.

Standards are Not Strategic

While there are certain standards, regulatory requirements, and areas of compliance – WCAG, a11y, SOC2, HIPPA, GDPR, etc. – that can (and sometimes, must) form the baseline of your design approach, they can never elevate your digital experience beyond your competitors’. These are necessary bars you must clear, but not sufficient to achieve strategic success.

By the same token, I do not mean to imply that every UI element needs to be designed from a bespoke set of First Principles. Depending on the specific medium of the experience you’re building – mobile apps, websites, AR/VR spatial experiences, kiosks or printed materials – there’ll be a set of design standards acting as guardrails on your available set of solutions.

Here are some examples of the kinds of “Best Practices” that teams lean on to help them through tight situations:

• Using a standard set of UI libraries to speed the design process. “We don’t need to redesign the wheel” for every button, tab, icon and form input.
• Looking to competitors for a guidance as to how to structure content on a page, or across a site; likewise drawing on competitors’ selections for navigation options
• Using a cookie-cutter “design system” or templated website/app
• Relying on GenAI-produced output for content, interaction design, or information architecture elements.

To be clear, I’m not saying that these are always poor decisions – but often as not, these options are chosen merely for their convenience and speed, without properly considering the offsetting costs that will only surface later.

Besides, they are not the most common type of “default to an established approach” decision that most organizations make, where resources are tight and the pressure to meet deadlines and budgets often forces teams to look for shortcuts, “easy wins”, or “low-hanging fruit.”

There’s also often an understandable desire among teams to rely on the expertise of established players, on the assumption that the specific challenges their business faces cannot be so unique or so specialized as to warrant a bespoke approach.

“This is how Google/Facebook/Apple/Tesla/Amazon/Microsoft does it,” is a phrase I’ve heard countless times. And given how successful (and dominant) these companies are in their respective fields, why would most organizations – who are not necessarily competing in these industries – not attempt to leverage or copy the results of their substantial digital experience development efforts?

Strategy is the Choices You’ve Made

I’m an enormous fan of Roger Martin and the clarity with which he talks about Strategy, a subject which many people find quite confusing. Summarizing decades of his work in a few sentences is not a task I’m up to, but I’ll pick a couple of points which I find particularly illuminating.

The first is the idea that “strategy is an integrated set of choices which allow you to compel customers to take a desired action.” There’s a lot to unpack here. I’ll focus on the practice of building websites and apps that enable an organization’s chosen audiences to accomplish their unmet needs.

Secondly: a strategic choice is one whose opposite is not “stupid on its face.” For example:

• Focusing on customers’ needs
• Providing an intuitive, easy-to-use interface
• Using deep data to inform what options and features to surface to different customer segments
• Delivering highly relevant content precisely at the moment of need

These are not strategic choices, but “operating imperatives”. To do the opposite of any of them would be foolish at best, but even if you hit all these objectives, you’re still only going to produce average performance. Everyone is striving to build intuitive, easy, focused, personalized experiences – these are mere table stakes.

When you put those two concepts together – choices about which customers to serve and which of their unmet needs to facilitate, plus the practice of making choices between options that are equally valid – you may begin to see why following a cookie-cutter approach will, in most instances, produce unimpressive results.

Any “best practice”, particularly in the area of Experience Design, is going to have a track record of producing satisfactory results. But of course, any approach with such a track record is one which can be easily copied, and therefore cannot produce an outcome which is distinctive from your competitors.

There are cases where this may not matter: where you’ve chosen to deliver a product or service which is distinctive in other ways, such as its level of integration with other systems, or a physical product with capabilities unmatched in the marketplace. Under those circumstances, a templated approach to delivering information about your product, and enabling its purchase, might be just fine. Your channel approach might de-emphasize entirely the digital experience associated with customers getting to know, or obtaining, your product.

But if the digital experience is in any way integral to what you sell and deliver, then it cannot be both distinctive in the marketplace, and result exclusively by relying on “best practices.”

You Must Choose – But Choose Wisely

When we think about what kinds of existing frameworks, design systems, templates and information architecture systems we want to apply to a digital experience, we need to consider that decision’s place in the cascade of choices that drive our market strategy.

That’s a mouthful, so to put it more simply: you can safely leverage pre-existing solutions if the choice to do so has no important implications for your overall business strategy. For example:

• Using an open-source or commercially licensable set of design system components or icons out of the box is fine, if a distinctive visual style is not essential to your brand character or competitive position.
• A templated “builder” site, such as those offered by many different hosting services, is a perfectly acceptable approach if you have no other digital properties whose style and maintenance need to be synchronized, or you are standing up a digital experience from zero and the product you’re bringing to market is distinctive from competitors in areas beyond the digital.
• Using Generative AI to create content (even with human eyes in the editing process) is fine, so long as you are not relying on GenAI to create anything truly novel or ground-breaking.
• Organizing a body of content, or presenting a set of options, using your competitors’ digital experiences as a guide, is acceptable if you are certain that you and your competitors are going after the same audience, and you are satisfied matching their performance from 6-12 months ago.

Those might seem like obviously bad tradeoffs to make, but there are absolutely situations where they’re appropriate; organizations need to start somewhere, and aspiring to middle-of-the-road performance is, by definition, aspirational for about 1/2 of any group of organizations in a given space. Levering up to “average” performance is definitely a viable approach for some, in the short run.

In the long run, however, this approach will always leave you playing catch-up. Leaders in any field are innovating in very specific ways, and those are never by looking at the middle-of-the-road for guidance. Instead, they are:

• Defining their customer base in ways which differ from their competitors.
• Searching for those customers’ unmet needs (for which there is, by definition, no “best practice” to follow);
• Experimenting with ways to stimulate and engage novel behaviors and interactions with an audience.
• Taking time to deeply consider and carefully construct measurements and proxy indicators of success, especially with customer behaviors that change slowly, or over a long period of time

Strategic success – long term, market-beating and market-defining success – is only a possibility when you move beyond best practices and put the work into defining a future which does not yet exist.