Should You Copy a Famous Site's Design? (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, August 23, 2010:

Should You Copy a Famous Site's Design?

Summary:
Although successful websites typically have high usability, average sites can hurt their business by copying design elements that don't work well in other contexts.

When faced with a design quandary, bosses are often inclined to say, "why don't we just copy X?" where X is some high-profile, successful website. There's something to be said for this strategy; presumably, Site X is doing something right, since they're so big and famous.

Furthermore, users prefer well-established designs that follow conventions and work as expected. For example, having a search box in the upper right corner increases the usability of your search simply because this is what users are accustomed to using in the location where they expect to find it. (See my book Eyetracking Web Usability for more examples of where people tend to look for various design elements.)

But copying successful designs is not a foolproof way to improve your own site's business value. Indeed, this strategy has many pitfalls.

(Note: When I say "copy," I don't mean that in a literal sense � that is, I'm not advocating copyright violations or design theft. Rather, I'm assuming that once you've considered the pitfalls and decided to go with a feature or design that's similar to a big site's, you'll create a new site that's inspired by that site's example. If you fear that your copy is too close to the original, consult a lawyer, but if you feel the need to do that you're probably already going too far.)

Why Copies Can Fail

There are two main reasons why copying another site can go wrong, even if that site is highly successful:

• The specific UI element you're copying is not that good.
• The design works fine in the original site's context, but it's no good in the different context offered by your site.

We recently ran a usability study of 17 big and famous websites: Amazon, Apple, BBC, Chase, Cisco, CNN, Facebook, Flickr, Google, Johnson & Johnson, Kayak, Netflix, TigerDirect, WebMD, The White House, Yahoo, and YouTube. Indeed, our research confirmed that these sites do many things right and have substantially better usability than the more average sites tested in many of our other projects. In fact, the big sites' success rate was 3 percentage points higher than the average for other sites.

Still, the study identified boatloads of usability problems in the big sites' user experience.

via www.useit.com

Remember -- just because a UI paradigm is used by a big successful site or company, does not mean it's a good paradigm in and of itself.