Spend failure wisely
A common language for evaluating risk in software design and development
Failure is an evergreen topic in tech, with every thought leader touting the benefits of taking risks and failing early in order to learn and iterate quickly. When people laud failure, they’re really talking about experimentation and iteration — exploring approaches for the sake of learning more about their audiences or developing new tools. But not every risk is worth taking. Time constraints, budgets, stakeholders, and customers can make failure a limited resource. The onus is on teams to make sure that they spend their failure wisely.
As one example of failure that could have been avoided, Gap.com redesigned their mobile shopping cart experience in Winter 2018. Visually, it was a much-needed overhaul, but it created serious usability challenges. In particular, it was too easy to disregard the address choice and send packages to the wrong destination. Having recently switched jobs, I sent a big order to my previous employer’s office by accident. When I went back to the site to delete the old address and choose a different default, I found I couldn’t do it anywhere, neither desktop nor mobile.
I recently noticed that I can now edit my addresses on the mobile site; I had 17 going all the way back to 2006. However, the checkout design…
