What’s the best way to balance innovation and convention? creativity and expectations? novelty and normality? When you have a good idea to improve the UX of your product when do you choose to use that rather than stick to what users are used to seeing? If you don’t have the option of doing user research and putting this in front of real users’ faces, what do you do?

I’ll start off with a story. A couple months ago, another developer and I came up with a fairly innovative way to improve how we do filtering in our product. This product hasn’t been released yet. We have other products that do similar things, but our product is completely new… unreleased… so this is time to improve it and try new things, right? So we bring our idea into one of the UI review meetings we have every week, and well… let’s say things didn’t go as planned. We heard comments ranging from "why is it changing?" to "what’s wrong with the old way?" to "this is completely unusable". Mind you, no one there had any real data either. They were just stating their opinion. We had several use cases where our method was superior and more powerful than what the product currently had, but that didn’t matter. They couldn’t see the value in the new paradigm we introduced.

In Observing the User Experience, Mike Kuniavsky talks about a company "Bengali" and their cutting edge, question all your assumptions, state of the art product "Typhoon". Typhoon was supposed to be the next generation web site. A revolution in the industry. The product that sets the standards in the coming age. The problem is that it didn’t follow any current conventions or standards or anything else that users of the day were used to. Worse yet, Bengali didn’t do any usability research until it was too late. Only then did they find out that users didn’t know what to do with it. It was too cutting edge… too revolutionary… too new.

In our UI review, it was pointed out that the filtering mechanism we have now works well and that people are used to it. And that’s a completely valid point. "If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it", right? But that just leads to uninspiring, stale products. Nothing really new ever gets created. So when do you innovate and when do you stick to conventions?