Why We Fail

The stories behind failures make for fascinating reading. But this book offers more. It provides important insights into both what can go right and what can go wrong in a product offering. To make great products, we need to understand what makes some fail and others succeed. To all the aspiring, young entrepreneurs who are reading this: take heed. Embrace failure to learn from failure. Learn from failure to avoid failure.

Don Norman Co-founder, Nielsen Norman Group Author of The Design of Everyday Things (Revised and Expanded)

Success feels great. But beyond the fleeting sensation of good will, what does it tell you? Failure, on the other hand, provides a gold mine of insights that can help you do better in the future—if you’re willing to do the hard work required to evaluate why things went wrong. Victor’s book provides a useful guide, with lots of examples that make it clear that you’re not alone in screwing up.

Karen McGrane, author of Content Strategy for Mobile

Success is boring. Failure is much more interesting—and instructive. In this practical and well-researched book, Victor Lombardi presents a series of vignettes about design projects gone wrong. He wisely avoids the temptations of schadenfreude, however, instead transforming these cautionary tales into useful lessons for the modern designer.

Alex Wright, Director of User Experience, The New York Times

At a time when companies are urged to fail early and often, Victor uses multiple case studies to take a sober look at what causes failure in product development, and provides useful tools to help teams avoid failure. His careful and thoughtful analysis should be required reading for every product team.

Neil Wehrle, Vice President of User Experience, betaworks

A diverse set of case studies to help illustrate experience design and its role in the development of 21st-century digital products and services. While intended to help companies avoid failure because of poor experience design, it’s also a good reminder that mistakes and errors, as long as shared openly, can be an important part of the development road to success. Victor’s proposed Experience Development method is a contemporary twist on the scientific method. His method may prove to be a useful framework for helping companies develop successful digital products and services, where success is measured by the subjective qualities of the intended users’ experience.

Leah Wang, Senior Vice President, Medscape/WebMD

By examining ambitious failures through the lens of experience design, you’re able to better understand why these teams made the decisions they did and, in doing so, arm yourself with the tools needed to avoid similar pitfalls

Alex Rainert, Head of Product, Foursquare

Exceptional user experiences are rare. Failures are common. You’ll be quickly reminded of that in Victor’s insightful analysis. But it’s the important lessons that we tend to forget. This book is full of thoroughly researched and insightful case studies on user experience failures in the digital realm. You’ll want to keep this book on your shelf to re-read again in the future when the industry comes back around to the brink of repeating some of the same failures. But maybe you’ll be in a position to tip success with what you’ve learned.

Mike Lee, Digital Strategist