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I was once in a role in which I was responsible for writing/maintaining a library of “best” practices for the product I worked with. The “stop saying best” con

I was once in a role in which I was responsible for writing/maintaining a library of “best” practices for the product I worked with. The “stop saying best” conversation is one that came up periodically, and for a time, I was very against using the word “best”. There is rarely a single right or best answer to any given problem, and I wanted people to understand this nuance. I didn’t want people to blindly follow the advice because it says “best” in the title. But over time, I changed my views. “Best Practices” is a label for guidance that tries to keep people on the rails. When people want to know what to avoid or what they should definitely do, they search for “<Product> Best Practices”. It’s a category of information as much as anything else. Calling these good practices, or implementation considerations, or some other label that tries to signal the nuance of the imperfect guidance or the impossibility of defining “best” just makes it hard to find the content. People are smart and understand that “best” can’t be taken at face value. The engineer in me wanted to hammer this point home by making the content label reflect this. But this doesn’t really help much, and makes it less likely for people to find and read the content, which is a net negative. And the people who will blindly follow advice will keep doing so regardless of the title.

mgaunard 3y ago
Guidelines is the correct word.
- microflash 3y ago
  Unfortunately, "guidelines" can also be weaponized as something that's optional, something subject to exceptions, leading to so many exceptions that the guidelines themselves are forgotten, and eventually outright ignored. Nevertheless, this is the term I've been using lately, mostly with a statement of guideline followed by its benefits or reasoning behind it. It is gentler and inoffensive to those who have tender sensibilities, thus enabling a productive embracement of the guidelines, a useful critic on them or an eventually better guideline, instead of inflamed egos inciting flamewars.
- haswell 3y ago
  I think guideline is a good word, and I’ve used it to describe/summarize the purpose of the “best practice” content I’ve written. But it’s not always a good top level category. This will depend on the product and the space used to publish the content. I worked on content that was published to a developer portal, which also had an integrated community, and this community had published guidelines for participating. In terms of content discoverability/SEO, guidelines is often overloaded. I started to look at this content as a direct extension of the overall product. And when thinking about naming things, it often most effective to meet users where they are. The technically correct label on a button is often not the label that actually resonates with users. Same goes for content, IMO (within reason). I think most of this is solved by a summary/abstract describing the content and what the user should take from it.

mgaunard 3y ago

Guidelines is the correct word.

microflash 3y ago
Unfortunately, "guidelines" can also be weaponized as something that's optional, something subject to exceptions, leading to so many exceptions that the guidelines themselves are forgotten, and eventually outright ignored. Nevertheless, this is the term I've been using lately, mostly with a statement of guideline followed by its benefits or reasoning behind it. It is gentler and inoffensive to those who have tender sensibilities, thus enabling a productive embracement of the guidelines, a useful critic on them or an eventually better guideline, instead of inflamed egos inciting flamewars.
haswell 3y ago
I think guideline is a good word, and I’ve used it to describe/summarize the purpose of the “best practice” content I’ve written. But it’s not always a good top level category. This will depend on the product and the space used to publish the content. I worked on content that was published to a developer portal, which also had an integrated community, and this community had published guidelines for participating. In terms of content discoverability/SEO, guidelines is often overloaded. I started to look at this content as a direct extension of the overall product. And when thinking about naming things, it often most effective to meet users where they are. The technically correct label on a button is often not the label that actually resonates with users. Same goes for content, IMO (within reason). I think most of this is solved by a summary/abstract describing the content and what the user should take from it.