Flexibility rules OK

There is a saying that rules are for the guidance of wise men and the obedience of fools. Paul touched on this last month, when he wrote about pre-roll advertising. As he said, you can’t standardise on a 15 second advert before your video streams without any sensitivity to the content of the advert and the audience. The value of the video plays a role too: I’ll wait a minute to watch South Park, but won’t sit around for a news report I could get more quickly somewhere else.

The problem with rules is that people forget to update them. They become set in stone. Did you know it’s illegal to beat a carpet, hang washing in the street or fly a kite? And don’t dare to think about firing your cannon near someone’s house.

We’ve seen this before. Jakob Nielsen created enormously valuable research that showed designers were creating sites without any regard for the user and that the customer’s needs had to be the focus of design if the web was to succeed. He coined the infamous ‘three click rule’, which said that everything on a site should be available within three clicks. But slavish adherence to this rule stifled the development of digital interfaces to the point where a new term had to be invented to get past it – ‘experience design’.

The three click rule made sense when people typically arrived at the homepage. With massive investment in search and affiliate marketing and much more deep-linking today, the only people on the homepage will be your customers who typed in your URL or those who have seen a promotion. There’s not the same need to offer everything on the homepage as there once was, and sites break down when the content is not clearly prioritised. If you understand the search terms people use when they arrive, and the typical customer journey, it’s possible to make information available quickly without trying to link every two pieces of content within three clicks. Let’s not forget, by the way, that using a search box could be one click.

The same thing has happened with accessibility, where the need to measure progress led to guidelines from 1999 being shoehorned into a set of rules for the ongoing development of accessible websites. This has led to linear development which has negated one of the strengths of the digital industry – lateral thinking. For example, while rollovers are a nightmare for many people with disabilities, the best solution might not be to have a text list of navigation. It might be to ask questions to help guide users to their content, or any other way of delivering what they need. If you stick to the rules, you’ll be scared to experiment and that could result in much poorer user experiences and website profitability. It’s no wonder that accessibility has become sidelined.

Rules are not answers. They’ve usually been written to govern something else at a different time. Often, they’ve outlived their useful life. You can’t treat everyone and every piece of content the same. For successful website development, the rules are ‘there are no rules’.