As part of our guide to UX careers, Springboard interviewed a bunch of UX designers to get their inside insights on what made for a successful UX career.
Our good friends at UXPin asked us to flip that dynamic on its head in order to examine what successful designers have learned from their design failure:
1. Sandy Woodruff
Sandy is a UX designer at Rent the Runway who has seen her work featured on Forbes, Fast Company, and as part of Apple’s Keynote. She’s also the co-founder and head of product of Intellibins, an intelligent solution to where New Yorkers should recycle, and a mentor for UX students at Springboard.
Frank Lloyd Wright once said, “A doctor can bury his mistakes, but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.”
A UX designer’s mistakes, luckily, do not have to bear the same gravity. If you have the right systems in place, failure is very much a part of the process. Who else has the advantage of being able to build, test, tear down, rebuild and retest without costly repercussions?
In art school I had a typography teacher who encouraged us to iterate on our project beyond what we thought was humanly possible, and had this to say about moving things around in InDesign: “It’s free”. It doesn’t cost anything to make 10, 100, or 500 more versions by sliding type around on the screen. You can bet that my version 10 mockup is always way better than my version 1 mockup, and I wouldn’t have gotten there if I didn’t do a couple dozen of failed (and often dumb) designs first.
One recent failure at our company happened when we did a huge revamp of an important part of our site. Tech, product, and UX all worked to improve both the technology that backed it, and the user experience. There was huge fanfare and excitement around launch, but shortly we soon found that it was not performing well and had to pull the release.
It was a huge blow to team morale, but we learned a number of valuable lessons. Now we release everything as part of an A/B test, avoid broad sweeping changes, test incrementally, separate major changes and detach tech framework improvements from UX improvements.
That’s why I like working product side as opposed to agency side. In an agency, you might send off work for a client and never hear from them again. On the product side, you have a responsibility to clean up your mess and therefore a built-in obligation to learn from your failures.
2. Eva Kaniasty
Eva runs her own company (Red Pill UX) based in Boston, is a regular at events of the UXPA Boston, of which she is the former President.
The biggest design mistake I’ve ever made has been not involving stakeholders in helping me execute research and design.
It can result in two negative outcomes: the first is that stakeholders remain apathetic and passive and have very little connection to the final design. The second is that their only level of engagement is what’s colorfully called ‘swoop n’ poop,’ or tearing apart a design they don’t feel any ownership about.
For me, the solution can be summed up in one word, “workshop,” and it means making every design and research activity as engaging as possible. I’m not going to lie, it can be quite difficult to change stakeholders from passive receivers of information into engaged collaborators, but here are some simple examples of where to start:
- Turn a sales pitch into a discovery workshop by handing everyone a dry erase marker.
- Turn research observers into active participants by handing out sticky notes and asking them to jot down their findings.
- Point a document cam at a notepad to sketch out proposed solutions during a remote meeting.
- Include dotted note-sheets in a report or presentation to guide people to put pen to paper.
The second part of the workshop puzzle is developing a toolkit of visual thinking methods (empathy mapping, dot voting, affinity diagramming to name a few of over a hundred out there), and running structured design workshops that incorporate those methods.
Taking the workshop approach definitely takes more, well, work, but the payoff is worth it: a better design, and a happier project team.
3. Emily Waggoner
Emily is a guardian of design who hones her craft as a UI/UX designer at the MIT Technology Review and as a mentor teaching UX learners at Springboard. Her personal website highlights her obsession with Harry Potter and calligraphy.
Failure in design is essential and unavoidable. Designers have a strong tendency and desire to finesse and tweak things inside a bubble, but designing in isolation is risky.
Every time we show our work to other people, whether it’s fellow designers or users, we have to put down our egos and accept that we may have created something that doesn’t work the way that we imagined. It can be a little hard to swallow at first, but it quickly becomes an invaluable way to solve problems along the way.
Instead of waiting until a big launch to release things into the wild for the first time, share your work as often as you can.
Once you see failure as an essential part of the process, it becomes less intimidating to put your work in front of other people. Failure in design is a problem-solving tool unlike any other.
I always say that I have to get all my bad ideas out to get to the good ones.
It’s okay to fail – It’s excellent, even. Failing in design should feel great because it’s a sign that you’re one step closer to the right thing.