Total Time: 45min
Remember the old marketing adage – “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half” – well, it’s the same with best practices. They work for half the websites, and you don’t know which half your website belongs to.
Blindly copying and implementing “best practices” is stupid – nothing scientific about it. You’re essentially using somebody else’s solution to their problems for your problems.
Best practices do have their place – as starting points. When in doubt how to solve a particular design issue – we can draw from the experience of others and usability research – and use it as input to our design hypotheses. The rest of the design choices should be driven by data.
There are no absolute truths
It’s critical to understand that there is no single best layout for a product page or checkout page. And there are literally unlimited ways to execute a checkout page that uses the exact same principles. There’s always lots of room for the way any idea is implemented, and you still need a great designer. Amateur designers can screw up even the best layout.