My big sore point which made me reluctant to talk about our mistakes is that we don’t do serious user testing before we launch (a website redesign) – so some issues don’t get identified after the site is live. We do go back and fix things, but non-urgent (i.e. UX not technical) issues can end up waiting until the next “Phase”. But I’ve realised in talking to other UXers recently that not all agencies/companies do follow the ‘correct’ process all of the time. We do what we can given the budget and time constraints we’re given to meet the success criteria we’ve identified. Projects which we’ve won based on our user-centred approach can have very un-user-focused KPIs (we’re working on that too).

After the initial inspiration of your talk, and a little reminder when I read Will Myddleton’s great blog post “we made mistakes” recently, I’ve finally committed to sharing a little case study of my own. I’m giving a lightning talk at the MK Geek Night later this month about a ‘mistake’ we made on a recent project to do with disregarding a key user group. We’re still in the process of researching how much of an impact it has made. But I’ve learned so much already from just identifying this as a problem and I hope that by sharing it, other people will learn something useful and practical too.

There is also something in this blog post which speaks to Boon Chew’s recent confessional blog post titled (in part) “why I’m not a UX designer any more“. It is exactly because people don’t share the real life stories that practitioners like Boon (and many others I’m sure) have these confidence crises. The more we all share our war stories, the less we’ll be worrying about what our fantasy super-star designers are doing, and the more time we can dedicate to doing good work.

There is a great book on the subject: “Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error” by Kathryn Schulz

UX professionals, are many times, tasked with so much to improve at one time (taxonomy, content, UI, process flow, multiple pages/levels, etc.) that yes, we may miss the obvious – so this is why we user test and collaborate with others to come up with the best solutions.

is there a bible for that? or just websites? (i’ve been hitting your url list here and there..)

tks