Why We Fail: Learning from Experience Design Failures - Softcover

Lombardi, Victor

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1933820179 ISBN 13: 9781933820170

Publisher: Rosenfeld Media, 2013

Synopsis

Just as pilots and doctors improve by studying crash reports and postmortems, experience designers can improve by learning how customer experience failures cause products to fail in the marketplace. Rather than proselytizing a particular approach to design, Why We Fail holistically explores what teams actually built, why the products failed, and how we can learn from the past to avoid failure ourselves.

About this title

About the Author

Victor helps organizations design products and build businesses that offer the best possible consumer experience. He does this by combining his liberal arts education and technology industry work into a perspective that is both practical and human. Victor began his career in IT on the help desk, where he daily witnessed poor design and helped customers overcome it. Progressing to system administrator, he learned how networks, servers, and websites actually work by building them. Transitioning to become an interface designer, he worked for a decade contributing to more than 40 software and Internet products for organizations such as General Electric, Cisco, J.P. Morgan, and the Southern Poverty Law Center. He's coached teams at Reed Elsevier and Rodale through the entire product development process, and helped turn around a failing media business at Fox Mobile Group through the development of a new web platform and mobile apps. He's passionate about learning and sharing what he learns: He earned a master's degree in music technology from New York University and a bachelor's degree in journalism from Rutgers University, co-founded the Information Architecture Institute and the Overlap conference, and taught at the Parsons School of Design and the Pratt Institute. He's also written a book, Why We Fail: Real Stories and Practical Lessons from Experience Design Failures. Finally, Victor walks the walk by developing his own product, Nickel, with the goal of making personal financial planning accessible to everyone.

Review

The stories behind failures make for fascinating reading. But this book offers more. It provides important insights into both what can go right and what can go wrong in a product offering. To make great products, we need to understand what makes some fail and others succeed. To all the aspiring, young entrepreneurs who are reading this: take heed. Embrace failure to learn from failure. Learn from failure to avoid failure. --Don Norman Co-founder, Nielsen Norman Group Author of The Design of Everyday Things (Revised and Expanded)

Success feels great. But beyond the fleeting sensation of good will, what does it tell you? Failure, on the other hand, provides a gold mine of insights that can help you do better in the future if you're willing to do the hard work required to evaluate why things went wrong. Victor's book provides a useful guide, with lots of examples that make it clear that you're not alone in screwing up. --Karen McGrane, author of Content Strategy for Mobile

Success is boring. Failure is much more interesting--and instructive. In this practical and well-researched book, Victor Lombardi presents a series of vignettes about design projects gone wrong. He wisely avoids the temptations of schadenfreude, however, instead transforming these cautionary tales into useful lessons for the modern designer. --Alex Wright, Director of User Experience, The New York Times

Success feels great. But beyond the fleeting sensation of good will, what does it tell you? Failure, on the other hand, provides a gold mine of insights that can help you do better in the future if you're willing to do the hard work required to evaluate why things went wrong. Victor's book provides a useful guide, with lots of examples that make it clear that you're not alone in screwing up. --Karen McGrane, author of Content Strategy for Mobile

Success is boring. Failure is much more interesting--and instructive. In this practical and well-researched book, Victor Lombardi presents a series of vignettes about design projects gone wrong. He wisely avoids the temptations of schadenfreude, however, instead transforming these cautionary tales into useful lessons for the modern designer. --Alex Wright, Director of User Experience, The New York Times

Edition details

• Publisher: Rosenfeld Media
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1933820179
• ISBN 13: 9781933820170
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 249