I like best practice. I’m not into what I would normally consider to be management rhetoric but at its core best practice is about abstraction. And being an ex computer programmer, I love abstraction. That’s what appealed about computer programming – progressively abstracting a problem until it becomes simple to solve.

I used to work during the semester breaks at university as a McDonald’s manager. I left with a good appreciation of how best practice can build multi billion dollar businesses.

Best practice is about techniques that work, and that are usually recognised the best way of doing things. So in the same way, if I can have some proven techniques to follow when I conduct user testing, or write a report on information architecture then it frees me up to think about how to get better results for clients or ways to make a difference.

That’s the thing – usability engineering doesn’t have the word engineering in the title for nothing. Although a bit softer than civil or electrical engineering, it is based on scientific rigor. It is based on processes designed to have repeatable outcomes.

Of course, best practice isn’t always good. The key to best practice in the workplace is making sure that you’re not "signalling to workers that they need to look no further for a better way of doing things" (The New Pioneers, Thomas Petzinger). Which is why we’re careful to make sure that in every project we do we’re always trying new things out. Quite often they are subtle, like changing the order of activities in a user test or how participants are recruited – all the while continually learning about how to tweak our own processes so that they are the best that they can be.

- Trent