You need to fail at Design to be any good at it

The best designers I know have experienced really clear failures — in that despite beautiful design work, plenty of effort and thought, they produced a design that was a total experience failure.

These failures hammer home the message that in designing experiences, there is no room for indulgent design.

What I mean by that is there’s no room for coming up with exciting but baseless visual direction, or building exciting new features that just sound cool or ‘innovative’ with no foundation in human understanding.

When we design things for people, the very core of the design is the human function or interaction for which it is intended. But sometimes it’s too easy as a designer to get excited and forget this.

My first design failure

My first design failure was when I was doing enterprise UX — developing applications and systems for internal employees. The organisation I worked for had 3000+ employees and were trying to upgrade the org-wide intranet. We’d got the green light to go ahead with an exciting tile-based re-design (this was in 2012 before Windows 8 was released) of Sharepoint’s social platform. The team was really excited, and I as the designer on the project was really excited about experimenting with a new design pattern. The decisions we made about what features to build were pretty arbitrary, and we built a lot of features.

I’ll be honest — we felt pretty good about ourselves. We thought it rocked and that people would love it. Even one of the Microsoft representatives commented:

“…[your organisation’s] deployment of their new SharePoint 2010 environment and MySites is one of the best implementations of the SharePoint platform I have ever seen! The Modern User Interface approach they have taken is leading edge and refreshing. This project demonstrates Woodside as a true leader in technology innovation that helps drive business change and increase productivity.”

Funny that we could get such huge momentum and energy around such an insulated view of our product. It was like we were in an echo chamber only hearing our greatness.

I’ll never forget the cricket chirping after we launched.

People weren’t interested. They either ignored it, or they dabbled in it and then left. We had some comments from senior management about the lack of value, or uselessness of it. It was such a huge divergence from what I imagined, and the failure was so apparent — we couldn’t hide from the organisation’s thoughts, feelings and response because we were there and could talk to the people and hear their responses, rumours, and see their uptake.

It became so clear to me that there’s really no place for designing in a vacuum. It felt like such a waste of time, so indulgent but valueless for the organisation. I vowed never to let myself get in a place where I would feel this way again.

Research: Amazing, No Research: Mediocre

I had a very interesting experience on a project assessing feasibility of creating a mobile app for gas plant inspectors, and seeing first hand the impact of research vs. no research. Our scope was to produce designs and assess both feasibility and the experience, and compare against existing software products.

The project had two customers with different needs:

• Operators inspecting a particular section of the plant regularly
• Electrical inspectors who reviewed electrical points and equipment

Due to limitations and constraints, we were directed to review a previous project’s understanding and documentation of the operators and their context, behaviour, requirements, and to conduct no research with operators. We were however free to conduct research with the electrical inspectors.

We flew up to the gas plant and spent a few days having workshops, conducting contextual interviews, and shadowing electrical inspectors as they went about their day. We mapped out our understanding and shaped how the app would work, all the edge cases it would cover, the different directions and guides it would give to inspectors with different experience levels (we captured the notes they took into the field and the prompts they referred to). We had a lot of very interesting and contextual details that we catered for in the design.

After that we produced two sets of designs — one for operators and one for electrical inspectors — to present in the assessments and judge against other software options.

I’ll never forget the disparity in response between the operators and electrical inspectors.

Both designs were gorgeous, stunning and comprehensive. Unfortunately, the operators’ response was lukewarm and full of criticisms, with doubt about using it successfully. We ended up running through the screens and discussing their work processes, how they categorised things and what their correct language and terminology was. Turns out we didn’t really understand how they did things.

In contrast, the lead electrical inspector’s response was:

“If we’d designed it ourselves, this is what it would have looked like”

They were blown away. And I loved how that made me feel — a mixture of empathy, warmth, satisfaction, happiness. I remember the feeling of really having nailed it — designs that really considered the people they were for and shaped like a glove to fit their world.

I never wanted to go back to those mediocre designs, I wanted to create designs that just seamlessly sat in the way people live and work, and that made them get excited and delighted so I could feel that strange empathy and satisfaction.

These two failures are significant milestones in my growth as a designer. Unfortunately a lot of designers never experience these kind of failures or epiphanies. There’s a huge currency in pretty designs because customers with no expertise can only judge on aesthetics and a lot of agencies make their money churning these out. Confirmation bias means that all forms of testing are often run poorly and don’t really reveal failure very well.

It’s good to ask yourself what kind of designer you are. If you’re not sure, then it’s definitely time to start really probing for experience failures and trying to be as honest and transparent with yourself as you can. We’re not all lucky enough to have our failures thrown in our faces, or experience such clear distinctions between different approaches.