> You should know exactly why you are building every little part of your system.
As a UX designer/researcher who focuses on exploring novel interfaces, if every company rethought their UI from scratch that would be great for my job security. But realistically there are good reasons why most companies default to following established UI conventions:
First, your users generally have significantly more experience using products from big companies than yours, and differences are often perceved as problems. See Jakob's law.
Second, sometimes a company that releases a novel solution does fantastically well. But more often than not it ends up being a lesson in why the convention existed in the first place. See Chesterton's fence.
Third, unless you want to make the UI a differentiating factor for your product then any time you spend iterating on novel interfaces is time you could have been spending on your company's core competencies. See... I dunno, Seth Godin, basically any startup blogger?
As a UX designer/researcher who focuses on exploring novel interfaces, if every company rethought their UI from scratch that would be great for my job security. But realistically there are good reasons why most companies default to following established UI conventions:
First, your users generally have significantly more experience using products from big companies than yours, and differences are often perceved as problems. See Jakob's law.
Second, sometimes a company that releases a novel solution does fantastically well. But more often than not it ends up being a lesson in why the convention existed in the first place. See Chesterton's fence.
Third, unless you want to make the UI a differentiating factor for your product then any time you spend iterating on novel interfaces is time you could have been spending on your company's core competencies. See... I dunno, Seth Godin, basically any startup blogger?