UIEtips: Failure Is Not an Option — It’s a Requirement

One of the many highlights of our recent UI13 conference was Scott Berkun’s Why Designers Fail and What to Do About It presentation. It generated a tremendous amount of buzz on the topic of how we can learn from our failures.

Interestingly, the theme of how to learn from failure was pervasive throughout the conference. Dana Chisnell talked about how to extract takeaways from usability tests. Jeff Patton discussed techniques for learning during the iterations of an Agile development process. Peter Merholz presented his challenges for organizations. And I discussed how teams need to celebrate failures, so teams have a chance to savor the rich insights that come from them.

It turns out that it’s no accident people are talking about failure these days. Over the last few years, our research has shown that the organizations that embrace the mistakes they make are more likely to show growth and improvement in their designs. That’s the great paradox: failure is strategically important to success.

In this week’s UIEtips, I describe how one nameless client got themselves into big trouble, how Amazon.com minimizes the risk from major design changes, and eight common mistakes preventing organizations from getting the most from their failures. I think you’ll enjoy it.

Read the article – Failure Is Not an Option — It’s a Requirement.

What does your organization do to embrace its failures? We’d love to hear from you. Share your thoughts below.