It’s natural to look to tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Apple for design inspiration. These companies are clearly successful and popular with customers, so why not copy their solutions to common design problems?

It’s actually a great idea to take a look around at your industry’s leading companies for inspiration about how to solve your own problems. But it’s not advisable to blindly copy a design just because another, bigger company did it first. Aside from the fact that giant companies operate in a completely different brand context, the truth is that just because a company is successful does not mean you can assume everything about its design is well-executed.

Here are some clear examples of designs that definitely should not be copied, in case you aren’t convinced — or, in case you need to convince someone else!

Minimalist Input Fields

In the last few years, minimalism has become wildly popular among designers. This trend has been so influential that some teams even attempted to apply it to basic data-entry fields, by replacing the traditional input box with a single line.

This input-field style was even adopted by Google (the biggest of the big): prior to 2017, it was included in Google’s Material Design.

Google obviously has a lot of talented designers and engineers doing fantastic work. But even a talented team doesn’t guarantee that everything they try will be perfect. In this case, the switch from boxes to underlines wasn’t actually an improvement in the user experience, and, in 2017, Google changed the Material Design input-field component back to a rectangles instead of an underline. Susanna Zaraysky and Michael Gilbert shared their research results about this design evolution publicly, explaining that after testing both usability and user preferences with hundreds of users, they concluded that “Enclosed text fields with a rectangular (box) shape performed better than those with a line affordance.”

Teams which rely on experimental, data-driven approaches to design usually try a lot of unsuccessful solutions before settling on good ones. An outside observer has no way of knowing which aspects of a design have been thoroughly tested and which are guesses that may not have yet received careful review.

Overly Decorative Menus

Amazon is another tech leader well-known for data-driven decision making. So, following its example may seem like a safe bet — but keep in mind that constant experimentation means a lot of ideas may get released only to be discarded after finding out they aren’t successful. Trying a design that ends up being hard to use may have only a small negative impact for a big company’s business, especially if it carefully monitors performance and quickly makes adjustments. But companies that don’t have the resources to constantly monitor and update their designs have more to lose by implementing a risky design and should be cautious about copying a pattern just because Amazon uses it.

For example, a while back Amazon used decorative, thematic images as backgrounds behind product menus in its mobile shopping app. Shoppers browsing the Outdoor Heating department saw a text menu of subcategories overlaid on top of an attractive image of a fire pit. Unfortunately, the background image made some menu labels quite difficult to read. This design has now been replaced by a category menu that is much easier to read, with high-contrast text labels appearing against a plain background.

Amazon may not have noticed much of an impact of a hard-to-read menu. Even if customers struggled with this menu, they’d be highly motivated to keep using Amazon due to other factors like its huge selection, low prices, free shipping, and the fact that so many customers already have an account with their address and payment information saved to make checkout easy. Ecommerce sites that don’t have those advantages are much more at risk of losing customers who can’t easily find a product.

Inaccessible Content: Gray on Gray

Reducing the contrast of less-important information is an effective strategy for making the most important information more noticeable. But it’s easy to get carried away and use colors that are too light to be legible — especially when displaying gray text on a gray background.

Apple is often associated with design excellence and has produced many examples of superb user experiences. But, unfortunately, it also exemplifies the problem of deemphasizing some parts of the design too much. As of this writing, Apple’s homepage shows product prices that are gray text on a gray background with a contrast ratio of only 3.47, well short of the 4.5 contrast ratio needed to meet the most minimal accessibility requirements.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that Apple’s business is at risk or that customers won’t buy its products. But just because Apple may be able to get away with it doesn’t mean that it’s okay. It’s wrong to use colors that will make text difficult or impossible to read for many people. There’s no good reason for doing it when you could easily adjust the text color to be a few shades darker.

Adding insult to injury, the information that Apple chose to deemphasize (the price) is not of low importance. Maybe Apple wants customers to ignore the price of its products, but all our ecommerce user-research studies (whether of B2C or B2B buyers) have unanimously concluded that users want to see the price. Pricing is one of the most important pieces of information considered when purchasing a product.

Use Context to Explain Limitations of Design Patterns

Many UX pros find that their colleagues advocate for design patterns solely because they are used by other successful companies. As one stakeholder put it: “If it’s good enough for Apple, it’s good enough for us.” The problem with this attitude is that you’re not Apple. Make sure to bring up this context to explain to colleagues how industry, market, and customers’ prior experiences make each brand’s UX unique. And that leading tech companies change their designs all the time, so even a design they use today could be easily replaced by something better tomorrow. Do your own prototype or A/B testing to ensure that a design solution works with your audience before you invest in building it, only to discover that it does not deliver the results you need.

Reference

Zaraysky, S. "The Evolution of Material Design’s Text Fields." Medium. 1 November 2019. https://medium.com/google-design/the-evolution-of-material-designs-text-fields-603688b3fe03