When Design Standards Backfire: How to Adapt Them for Better Products

Technological development has dramatically increased production efficiency, leading to the emergence of standards to support large‑scale rapid production.

In traditional industries, standards have created countless miracles: standardized McDonald’s ensures identical burgers worldwide; standardized PC architecture enables hardware compatibility; standardized network protocols allow imported phones to work domestically; even subway card systems rely on standards.

In web‑based design, we often standardize common components, creating a design system (interaction, component, visual standards) that greatly reduces duplicate design and development, maximizing efficiency. Below is an example of a basic design specification diagram for a website.

Having such a design system offers several benefits:

UI and interaction designers can reuse existing component styles and interactions, selecting appropriate designs from the standards when building new features.

Front‑end developers can turn standardized designs into reusable components that can be invoked with parameters for different contexts.

Using the same components provides consistency, lowers user learning cost, and improves user experience.

Beyond UI, broader “standards” exist, such as Google’s minimalist homepage layout, which has become a de‑facto standard for search products.

Following industry conventions brings additional advantages:

Users familiar with similar products can quickly get started, reducing learning cost and enhancing experience.

When development time is tight, borrowing proven conventions saves research and analysis effort, though some may call it “copying” or “micro‑innovation”.

However, standards cannot be applied blindly; doing so may damage the final product experience.

For example, a Baidu advertising system required a hierarchical keyword location feature. The original design standard used cascading dropdowns, which works for account‑>plan‑>unit levels but fails at the keyword level where thousands of items exist. The solution replaced the dropdown with an input field and fuzzy search.

Standards also affect product strategy. Renren’s insistence on real‑name social networking works for its audience, but “career‑focused” SNS platforms (e.g., Tianji, YouShi) need privacy, making strict real‑name policies unsuitable.

These platforms adopt three different real‑name strategies:

Strict real‑name requirement, like Renren.

Moderate policy: names must follow a format (e.g., “Henry Liu”), allowing English names but rejecting obvious nicknames.

Open policy: any nickname is allowed.

Finally, public signage for foreigners illustrates the need to choose appropriate standards. For pedestrian signs, pinyin transliteration may be more helpful; for driver navigation signs, English translation conveys meaning faster.

In summary, well‑crafted standards boost efficiency and product consistency, but they must be adapted to specific contexts and user needs rather than applied indiscriminately.

PMs and UEs must collaborate closely to create reliable products.