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I was actually discussing this post a few days ago with one of my UI/UX designer friends, and he made an interesting point - On news forums like Hacker News we

by pshin45 12y ago

I was actually discussing this post a few days ago with one of my UI/UX designer friends, and he made an interesting point - On news forums like Hacker News we see a lot of failure stories from engineers and marketers about how and why their product or marketing campaign failed, usually ending with some lesson about product-market fit and understanding your users. But my friend posed the question, Why don't more designers talk about their design failures? For example, Julie Zhou (Director of Product Design at Facebook) has written some awesome blog posts on Medium about her design process, but what if she also wrote an essay about "Why Facebook Home Failed"? What if Mike Matas (Design Lead for Facebook Paper) wrote an essay about "Why so few people are using Facebook Paper"? (I have no stats on the % of "failure stories" that are written by designers vs engineers vs marketers, but anecdotally it seemed to ring true to me.) So why is it that designers don't like talking about their failed designs? I thought about it long and hard but couldn't think of a good reason why that might be. Would love to hear your thoughts on the matter!

general_failure 12y ago
Why talk about it and reduce their value in the market place? I have hardly seen CEOs blog openly about their failures as well. It is career suicide. There are very few people who would think of these writeups as some sort of 'open' and 'honest' communication. And TBH, I think people do that only if those people are already successful and this was some one-off.
carrotleads 12y ago
excellant point. and on the same note when designers change their previous designs, are they stating that the older design "failed" or didn't work or is always just for novelty. For ex: I love Square cash's earlier page design and I clearly understood how it worked. But now its changed. Did it not work earlier? Was it a failure. https://square.com/cash https://square.com/cash

by pshin45 12y ago

general_failure 12y ago

Why talk about it and reduce their value in the market place? I have hardly seen CEOs blog openly about their failures as well. It is career suicide. There are very few people who would think of these writeups as some sort of 'open' and 'honest' communication. And TBH, I think people do that only if those people are already successful and this was some one-off.

carrotleads 12y ago

excellant point. and on the same note when designers change their previous designs, are they stating that the older design "failed" or didn't work or is always just for novelty. For ex: I love Square cash's earlier page design and I clearly understood how it worked. But now its changed. Did it not work earlier? Was it a failure. https://square.com/cash https://square.com/cash