Default to convention

Why this rule exists

Users arrive at your product carrying a lifetime of learned patterns from every other product they have used, and those patterns are an enormous free asset if you honor them and an expensive liability if you fight them. When a control looks and behaves the way people already expect, they know how to use it without being taught, which is the closest thing to magic an interface offers. Reinventing a well-established pattern spends the user's effort re-learning what they already knew, and the novelty rarely pays back what it costs. Convention is not a lack of imagination; it is respect for the user's existing knowledge and a decision to spend your originality where it actually matters rather than on making familiar things strange. The best designs are unremarkable in the places where being remarkable would only slow people down, and they save their invention for the genuine problem the product exists to solve. Follow the convention unless you have a real, tested reason not to.