It’s okay to break the rules sometimes

Beware of hard-fast rules, you can always find reasons to break them.

This is something I find common among user interface designers—rules that are so sacred, violation will untwine the threads of society as we know it; crippling the entire internet to a slow and painful end.

This, of course, is simply not true. Breaking a few design best practices does not necessarily mean you’re creating monster about to be unleashed in the city. Design rules are merrly suggestions that—in most cases—facilitate a consistent user experience. Sometimes breaking the rules can even improve user experience.

The other day, I was discussing this with a colleague who was convinced opening new windows (either through a new browser or javascript popup) was one of those rules that should never be broken. There are many reasons behind this and the his reason is it creates an unusual user experience. Opening a new window navigates the user away from what they’re working on and eliminates the use of the browser’s back button (used 80% of the time to navigate websites). Another valid reason is because the use of the HTML anchor attribute [target="_blank"] to open a new window has been deprecated and the W3C recommends not using it.

Although these are completely valid reasons, it doesn’t mean there are never reasons to break this rule. He asked me to give a real life example. I told him you can open a new window if opening in a current window interrupts a task that a user is working on. More specifically, one client of mine needed a chat support feature that could be used while the visitor browsed their website. This feature provided a reasonable change in experience and it actually increased sales and improved customer service.

The danger of being completely controlled and dictated by design rules is it undermines the very reason user experience is so effective—it helps get past process and predetermined notions to effectively meet the needs of your users. Also, sometimes you have to loose battles in favor of improving experiences elsewhere and make your customer happy. Anytime it gets in the way of building the best product—that’s when you know breaking the rules is okay.