In my recent conversations with young and aspiring designers, this question came up frequently – what does being original mean and where does it have its place in design?

As designers, we are wired to think that we have to be original and create unique experiences wherever we go. You’d want to build innovative things that set you apart from the crowd. But do people always like, and more importantly, benefit from these unique experiences in the way they are intended to?

There’s a place for both. At the end of the day, there’s nothing more important than the user’s needs. It’s advised and sometimes needed to use common patterns for the most common tasks like login, search, support, etc. But there’s always room to add tweaks that elevate the experience. For example, adding a way to search visually or continuing from the last search results while maintaining the well-known search input box can be a way to balance originality, usability, and familiarity. However, for more complex tasks, or cases that are not so common, it’s wise to look into original ideas aligning with the goals of the requirement.

At the end of it, it’s essential to look back at your ideas and see whether they satisfy the requirements, and are usable or not. For a population almost reaching 8 billion, the pressure to be original that we put on ourselves is not justified. Human progress is often the result of iterating on the collective knowledge of previous generations, and the same applies to UX. The primary goal of UX design is to create meaningful and seamless experiences that work for the intended users, and original ideas should serve that purpose, rather than being an end in itself.