Most often best practices are hard to follow and often questioned on the rationale behind the same. Recently I had my car serviced at the car vendor’s service outlet. Always there was a question that lingered in my mind on a card board box that gets placed at the top of the car indicating the ticket/token number indicating the car service ticket number . This is opposed to the bike service experience of mine , at the bike service station the guy attending the customer always does this by means of scribbling the number by means of a wet chalk. Used to wonder why the car guys do not follow the same thing and why do they resort to the card board box on top of the car with a number on the box. Used to think that this was something only my car vendor service team followed. More recently went to another car service station from an another car vendor. There happened to see the same practice of the card board box with the number atop the car for the car ticketing. It then stuck me that this was indeed a best practice. If the car guys were to follow the bike way of doing it by chalking the service ticket number at the back of the car , then car being a larger entity , the mechanic needing to know which token this car belongs to would need to go to the rear of the car.This is a pain every time he needs to know this number. Also by keeping the ticket/token at the top would mean that the number would be visible from all angles and sides. Even this would be visible from far away as the number is marked on all four sides of the rectangular cardboard box.
Should say that this is indeed a best practice followed by the car service teams across vendors.The earlier version of the phone chargers were not having the power point insert symbol. These days most have it and provides for a great user experience. Use best practices and add value to the people behind it…
Similarly we resort to best practices at times knowing fully well the benefits of the same some times not knowing why they are there in the first place. But they do bring with them a story of solving pain points and get refined along the way if there is additional learning. This is true of companies,projects,architecture,design etc. Choose the best practice try it , test it , refine it and use it at will. At times you may not fully understand why they are there in the first place but use them always or at least look out for…