The Dangers of Sampling

Designing interfaces for complex Web apps is difficult for a number of reasons: business requirements, technology, user-based conventions, subjective preferences, etc, but one way to help move the process along is the practice of adhering to conventions observed through sampling. Observing how a problems is solved in other places (effectively or not) helps provide supporting evidence for a decision as well as the peace of mind that comes with knowing people have some experience with the task.

Sampling can also inform subjective preferences like color palette or typeface. “Salesforce uses a lot of red and we have the same customers so we should use a lot of red…” for example. This is, arguably, harmless enough–though certainly doesn’t do much for establishing your product as unique–but if not kept in check, sampling experiences can have potentially devastating consequences. Enter Microsoft’s Bing search engine.

In Ryan Singel’s Wired article, “Kayak to Bing: Stop Copying Us! – Update” the similarities of Bing’s travel site and the popular travel site, Kayak, are profiled along with the pending “discussions” between the two organizations legal departments. How Bing ended up looking like it did is something that may be very difficult to identify in the end. It may be a result of technology requirements, cross-industry usability research, or a lazy UX designer (though I doubt as much). Ultimately, it’s unfortunate that the process of observing best practices, which may have started with the best of intentions, has lead to something so poorly vetted. Microsoft continues to struggle with courting the Web audience and I suspect this is mostly to blame. When you want to be a part of the club, you’re going to dress like everyone else in the club.

A big part of what user experience design attempts to achieve is the balance between unique and usable, innovative and simple. If Kayak has identified an interaction design pattern that makes for the best possible presentation of search results for airline tickets I find it a little difficult to defend the idea that nobody else should be able to incorporate that pattern into their own experiences. This line between innovation and usability will continue to blur as more and more of our digital interactions shift from the desktop to the browser and it will be the shared responsibility of businesses, technologists, and designers to make sure we can walk that line.