Learning from Adaptive Path's Mistakes

[Live Blogged Notes from UX Week 2006]

LB: Wanted to call it Learning From My Colleague's Mistakes. This is funny because we are always trying to avoid being seen as having made a mistake.

We all screw up. But more to the point, the best stuff comes out of the learnings from things that don't go well.

So here's a third title: FAILURE!.... FA!LURE... steal from the best.

So this panel is going to talk about failure. It is a truism: fail fast, fail quickly, fail is not a bad thing. In Silicon Valley failure is very important, it is a badge of honor. Failing upwards is not uncommon.

So let's dig in.

1. Failure is Fun. You usually get there because you are trying something new. That's a good thing.
2. Failure is Fixable. Very few people are working on the Challenger. When we have disasters they are virtual, its a server going down, its something we can get past.
3. Failure is Easy. Actually failing to do something is actually difficult. Its hard to screw up that badly. What failure is easy means is once you've hit bottom there's only one way to go. Success is difficult because it brings options. It means you have something to prove and choices to make.

So let's get some stories.

DV: Measure Map was really a sweet setup but there was a clear point where a misstep was hard to recover from. They rolled it out to a small group of people. Everything was running smoothly. But you have to keep this moving forward and that is hard. At some point the level of service started to degrade. The magic started to go away and it is hard to get it back. You make an implicit promise that a high level of service will continue.

JV: When he thinks about the goals of the Measure Map project he thinks that they must have been mistaken or else they never would have been able to get anywhere close to there. He talked to a Google project manager and was asked about how much time each template needs. This is wildy unrealistic and is clearly a way not to think about design work. He can design it when the inspiration is ready to happen but that's also a crappy answer. Setting expectations are important. You want to set a milestone. They set a goal of presenting at the Ajax summit and two days before they were nowhere near being ready. The demo was a fake, you only clicked on the things that you could click on. Even if you miss milestones they at least give you a place to try to get to.

RF: The hardest thing is working with someone who you realize can't push your idea forward in their organization. One solution is to take a t-shirt to a meeting that says "I have budget authority" and ask who gets it. Talk to that person!

AW: So a client wanted a design solution and Jesse used the word Ajax to explain something and the response was tepid at best. But they started talking more about this and we all know what happened next.

RF: Jesse's word helped bring value but not to the audience he first presented it to. At panels and conferences you don't often know who you'll be speaking to. Context and audience is very important.

JV: Jesse's coining of Ajax to sell ideas internally was a good lesson in building ideas to share what you've learned. That's why AP always shares ideas and counts on the value coming back. When AP fails is when they've held things back. They always succeed when they give things away for free.

LB: This is also very helpful for professional development. If you're always giving away ideas you have to keep coming up with new ones. This is also why the culture of critique is so important. You have to be constantly willing to be told how your work is doing. One place that really understands that is art school. People who go to art school understand how to take and give critcism.

JV: The notion against taking criticism is based on the idea that everything you come up with is good. You don't have to make something perfect right now. Do something boring, solve that problem. Like Michael Bierut said, start with the obvious. With Measure Map they iterated and iterated and threw out ninety percent of their code. They were sketching with the product itself.

RF: The worst thing is going a long period of time without having anything to react to.

PM: He is a very abstract thinker and presents ideas sometimes with the realization that abstraction can get people too attached to an idea before its baked. Be willing to iterate your half-baked ideas.

LB: When you do that you set the tone. You give people permission to fail.

RF: No idea is sacrosanct. There's nothing that can't be messed with.

IY: When dealing with a client she got asked why something was done a certain way and had to answer that she didn't know. This scared her but really the client wanted to explore it together. You have to be able to admit that you are wrong.

Q: This really disarms the audience and helps people feel comforable to talk about whatever is on their mind. You are vocalizing whatever is on their mind.

Q: Something that Janice said earlier about integrity. Clients don't want to feel like they are being sold something or that they are stupid. If something isn't right and everyone admits it clients are forgiving. If you are just trying to convince they will sense that. If you have integrity and are trying to help them.

LB: Our fear of making a mistake leads us into that pattern. The thing that he most worries about is often in other people's mind not a big deal. But it will become a big deal if it snowballs. If you mention it at the beginning.

JG: You can't always be sure or count on the people you are working with or for having the same goals that you have. Did a technically complex project where they engaged with the technology lead and worked with his people. Worked on something. Tested with users. The tech people are excited, the business people are excited, but when the technology manager came back into the loop he said that it will never work, because he made the original system. Should have gotten buy-in.

LB: Janice says that business decisions are emotions wrapped up in logic.

JV: On projects where the consultant and client don't work together. One thing is that maybe you shouldn't have been working together in the first place. Think about what kind of clients you want. Make sure that you are doing good important work. Make sure you can make something that you want to talk about. Will it be lucrative? Keep them in that order. Important > Can talk > Lucrative. This was when things were tight in the industry but really helped make sure that the projects would start off being successful.

RF: When you start off wrong it will end wrong.

Q: So when have to gotten fired or fired a client.

JV: He got fired once. Because he didn't evaluate from the beginning. It exploded. Every meeting had more stakeholders with more meetings and nothing got done so they fired him. He should have done the up-front research to find out that it wouldn't work.

LB: The flip side of that is a project they took because they wanted it but knew they shouldn't. Figured out a project plan with a big non-profit. Do their best to be open and flexible. When you cut down the budget to be able to work with a client you have no flexibility. It led to a lack of communication because there wasn't enough budget for face time. There was a lack of willingness to make needed changes because there wasn't money! The first part of a project should be making a plan and the second part should be fixing and changing that plan. If you don't it won't work.

AW: Research is often an opportunity to learn all kinds of things you didn't know going in. The way you respond to mistakes demonstrates that you know what you are doing.