Don't let your quest for usability overpower your site to the point of drowning out your brand's unique flavor.

We've always really prided ourselves on building sites that are "usable." If a user can get through a site unobstructed from Point A to our goal page, then we've done a good job. 

When I get into new business meetings, it is invariable that the prospect will ask how familiar we are with the "best practices" in their industry. What have we done for someone who looks like them?

Most often, we find a relevant example that proves our knowledge of the space, our knowledge of best practices and, ultimately, our ability to build usable sites. I believe that is a problem. Those three things combined, to most, sound ideal, however, I believe that those three combined can produce results that are, to use a metaphor, vanilla. A lot of people like vanilla and I'd say that vanilla is definitely the safest of flavors, but it is tough to get passionate about vanilla. You can put toppings on it, you can mash other things into it, but it is still vanilla.

I think that this is the difference between usability and user experience. I know that many people in the industry, particularly those in the field of user experience, have been working to better define the difference, however, that definition has failed to reach the client-side decision-makers. They continue to ask for usability and for in-industry best practices.

In my opinion, user experience is focused on ensuring that the targeted user gets the best experience possible based on the desired outcome for that user. So, for one example, a user gets through a shopping cart without obstruction (in this case, it would be easy to say that the cart was "usable"). That is pretty straightforward and common; we optimize regularly to tighten a checkout process.

Another example is the case of a client, Garden Fresh Restaurant Corp. (owner of Souplantation & SweetTomatoes); a user looking for a particular menu item at a particular location has to be exposed to all other nearby locations in his quest for the desired menu item. There is nearly zero drop-off in the user's path, as a usability purist might expect, but as a result of this experience, the user may be educated about a new, nearer location. With a usability focus, we might provide our users with a different function that pairs them with their desired menu items much more quickly, but we know, from analytics, that they're going to get there and we need them to know something that may improve their experience with the restaurant in the future. Ideally, that is user experience.

I was speaking at an event a few months ago and I was highlighting some of the design elements of another site we'd built for Turning Technologies. I had defensible statistics for just about everything; however, there was an audience member who simply could not break away from "best practices." On the site we'd chosen to put the logo in the top right corner and do a few other things that break with conformity. We'd made those decisions deliberately to, among other things, illustrate that this company is different from the rest; we had seen no adverse effects from doing so (though, of course, we could definitely deepen our testing of the site). But, again, this audience member could not let it go; it was not "best practice" to do some of the things we'd done. And I couldn't agree more. But, by being different (and they do a lot of things differently), this company was ranked the 14th fastest growing company in the U.S. by Inc Magazine and the seventh fastest by Entrepreneur Magazine. The company certainly didn't achieve those ranks exclusively by its site, but it has done so by not allowing itself to be vanilla.

The concepts provided above are most definitely open for debate, simply because this work is so rarely done. The experience can always be improved, and there is definitely room for usability improvements in all work. However, we need to step back and ensure that a usability enhancement doesn't diminish the brand, nor does it minimize the experience. If we simply focused on in-industry best practices and pure usability, we would end up with sites that mirror one another rather than deliver an experience that best reflects the company. Consumers would find it difficult to differentiate a brand best connected with on a more personal or emotional level.

Think about the real-world and notice the unique feel of each of these brand experiences: Target compared to Walmart, Best Buy to Circuit City, Starbucks compared to just about every other coffee shop. These, I think, are pretty obvious examples of how experience differentiates a brand; there are hundreds of others. My request to those of you who manage a company's web channel is, Know your customer and consider his experience and what you want his branded takeaway to be. How do you want your stakeholders to feel?

Reid Carr is president of Red Door Interactive. Read full bio.