My talk at UX London this year was about the iPad app that Paul Lloyd and I designed for The Week magazine. It’s been doing rather well in the App Store (The majority of ratings are 4-5 star and it’s held the number 1 spot in the UK newsstand category a good few times), but my talk was about the mistakes we made behind closed doors in the early stage design process –Â the stuff that people would normally skip over when giving a conference presentation.
One of the things that bothers me about the UX scene is the fact that there’s so much showmanship and self-promotion involved. People always talk about the importance of allowing for mistakes in the design process, but they rarely share real life stories about those mistakes.
It seems to me that there are two reasons for this. Firstly, design mistakes are always painfully obvious in retrospect. Think of all the usability test reports you’ve seen in your career. I’ll bet you reacted to every single issue with the thought “Duh, of course!” Funnily enough, this is also the reaction we give when we see a radically well designed product for the first time: our reaction is also “Duh, of course!”. The point is, when something is brought into perspective in your mind, it’s hard to consider it any other way. This is actually a well-researched cognitive bias (i.e. something we can’t help because of the way our brains are wired) called the hindsight bias.
Moving onto the second reason: embarrassment. People don’t like to look stupid in front of their peers. Why focus on the rocky road to achievement, when you can focus on the achievement itself? That’s the thing to be proud of, right? There’s a certain logic here, but it means that graduates and new practitioners don’t get to see the full story. They learn the methods and the outputs, but this is a bit like trying to learn to become a professional chef from a recipe book and practicing at home with some friends.
With it, we have the herd mentality. Nobody else is doing it, so why stick your neck out? It’s easy to feel that your own daily working life is an anomaly – that there are “real designers” out there who don’t make mistakes, don’t feel the pain of political pressure and don’t find that sometimes a day has passed and nothing productive has happened. It’s bullshit. We’re human and we’re all on a learning curve. Feeling a bit dumb is a productive state to be in, because it means you’ve recognised your weaknesses and you’re hungry to fix them. It’s when you don’t feel stupid that you should be worried.
There’s nothing to be ashamed about making good mistakes that take place within the safety of your design process and help you towards a better product.
Mistakes are fascinating. The social, organisational and psychological issues that lead to design mistakes are fundamentally important to understanding how to be a good designer and how to run an effective design team.
sorry to post such a general question, but i’ve been trying to find a UX read that would set me up (or actually start me up) with great design.
is there a bible for that? or just websites? (i’ve been hitting your url list here and there..)
tks
Great article and some really good points. I definitely see certain types of people playing Monday-night quarterback when pointing out reports that may talk about those obvious solutions.
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.
Absolutely mistakes are important, in fact, the way we reason (rapid guesses most of the day) with frequent mistakes, is the reason why human intelligence is (so far) more efficient than computer intelligence.
There is a great book on the subject: “Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error” by Kathryn Schulz
Amen! I was gutted to have gotten stuck abroad with passport problems while you were giving this talk. Hope to be able to catch a talk or two in the future.
I found your talk at UX London really useful Harry. I started to think about how I could talk about mistakes I’ve made on projects – and what I’ve learnt from them – but sure enough, I hesitated a long time about actually sharing anything.
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.