Blog of Much Holding

I had the great opportunity to speak at the second Internet Summit in Raleigh, NC last week about UX and design matters, and one of the questions that was asked was a good one: When marketing wants advertising to take up a certain space or work a certain way, and some basic usability and design principles would be compromised by doing it that way, what do you do?

My initial flippant response was “pistols at dawn.” Of course, that won’t work (though sometimes it may seem VERY desirable).

My follow-up, which I’ll restate here, is simple: Test the idea that marketing has to show ads in your site/app the same way you would test your own ideas. Why you do this is, to me, obvious: If the design principles are being compromised the way you think they may be, then testing with user will very quickly prove this. If not, then maybe those design principles aren’t so hard-and-fast after all.

Yes, potential UX heresy: Best practices and design principles need to be TESTED, not just assumed. Sometimes (many times, in my experience) a non-UX professional will have a good and different way of doing things, and we always need to be open to different ways of designing. So, back to another best practice – test new designs.

So, to answer my own blog title – it’s not about winning or losing, it’s about providing the best experience for users. And we need to question our assumptions via user testing in order to do so.

Finally, for the record, I do not look at UX versus marketing as a good thing – I have many friends in marketing and, at their core, they are all striving to do what UX professionals want – encourage adoption and use of your products to make your company money. They are just going about that differently – in some cases, very differently.