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 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.

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