There’s plenty of best practices out there when it comes to design. Furthermore, there’s plenty of advice and warnings. Everyone’s got their view, and everyone’s got an opinion. Research is done, and then the conclusions are drawn and applications are generalized and universalized and disseminated to the waiting design community.

This, however, is not to say there isn’t some good stuff out there. Good stuff, when found, should be treasured and an evaluation made as to whether or not its counsel has been observed in our product.  When the counsel sheds prescriptive light on what we ought to do, then it’s our team’s job to start moving the UI in that direction when the opportunities present themselves.

Ultimately, however, each application and website is different. They have different purposes, and their applications accomplish different measurable goals and serve different audiences. The ultimate test, no matter the number of studies and research and best practices out there, is simple: usability tests with real clients and users on our application. It’s not even about what our clients or users say… it’s what they do. That’s why observation is so important: what do they actually do?  What are they clicking on?  Where are they making mistakes and clicking on the back button?

We’re working on a project these days with a different front-end implementation than other parts of our product. It’s been exciting to work on, and both developers and our Usability Team are jazzed about it, not just about the project itself, but what it can lead to in other parts of our product. That future focus is cool, and combined with some of the best practices and research out there, as well as validation by usability tests, things are looking and feeling pretty good this Friday.

The lack of blog postings here has been, unfortunately, a product of our inattentiveness to writing, as well as a focused effort from the inside to consider our approach to the Convio UI. More recently, however, the number of projects has swelled and our attentions and time have been consistently applied to some exciting stuff–kind of feels like running after a train heading out of the station. It’s even more difficult when that train is one of those speedy bullet ones.

Going back to that “focused effort” at thinking about our approach to the Convio UI: We’ve recently sat down as a Products team to think about where we’re going. Idealistic designers (like this one) have always imagined design to be a top-down application of theory on a needy product. Imagine the unveiling of the iPod on the mp3 player world 6 years ago. It wasn’t merely an improvement to mp3 players. It was a fundamental design move that was revolutionary. Take Microsoft Office as another example: the MS Office team wasn’t simply adding a new feature here and there, as they did for Office 3.0, 4.0, 95, 97, 2000, XP, 2003… When they unveiled Office 2007’s Ribbon UI, they scrapped the old paradigm and put on a new hat. They did the dreaded R word: redesign. They applied a top-down change to the UI. You can argue the success or failure of Microsoft’s approach, but a couple things you can say: it was gutsy and boy, did that take a lot of time and resources.

Are we ready for a top-down change to the Convio UI? Probably not, which is not to say some people aren’t advocating for it. But given the resources we have, the calendar time available, and the number of cool things we want to do, let’s go for a bottoms-up approach. Get easy wins extant in the product on a rolling, consistent basis; structure our team to tackle each project that comes to the table; get some standards in place that can guide both our team moving forward and that can be applied retroactively to UI already in the product, and leave the top-down UI change for another battle.

That sounds good to me. And while it’s an approach that falls short of the design-fiend idealism of introducing worldwide change all at one time, it’s a boundary that, once accepted, will hopefully allow for some innovative, substantive stuff. And that’s a hopeful note to start on as we move into the new year.