Reveal your mistakes: a principle for transformation
In the past few weeks, you may have noticed that Slapdashery has been rather quiet — I’ve been working on a short, intense project to show a new client a digitally native way of working (and then Leading Design got it the way). I’ve had very little time to think of anything else, not even 5 mins each day for writing.
The intense pace wasn’t quite design sprint level, but it was close. We had a very small budget, and we set ourselves some ambitious goals in a short amount of time. As it happens, things went rather well. Almost too well.
Once we’d done a short discovery phase, I played back our findings and some hypotheses. Nothing earth-shattering. Just some ideas about how to solve the problem that we’d like to try to design and test for (it was about the design of bills).
After we’d put together a design, the testing of the hypotheses turned out to be an epic success. If the six participants are anything to go by, we can significantly reduce customer pain, and deliver multi-million pound savings back to the organisation.
During the tests, there were some moments where the participants literally paraphrased my hypotheses, unprompted. I couldn’t have asked for better soundbites to play back to stakeholders (a process we’re currently kicking off).
As I edited the video footage, I started to wonder if the quotes were almost too good — as though when I played them back during a presentation, I’d look… smug. That’s when I went back to the list of test outcomes, and picked out some smaller issues that didn’t work so well to include as video clips in the playback. The successes (I hope), are more plausible when they’re presented alongside failures. To relate this back to user research — I’ve spotted some people check both negative and positive comments on Amazon products, just to check they’re not being bullshitted.
By showing some mistakes alongside the wins, we should make our message more plausible. But that’s just persuasion, perhaps. The main point is that experimenting and iterating your way to a goal involves some failure. To a organisation that stigmatises failure, one that actively avoids it, showing them some humility in a safe context can only help to shift the culture. That’s my hope anyway, perhaps I’ll report back after a few weeks once we know how the medicine is going down.
