Comments on Success Stories

Paul Bryan — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 19:20:05 GMT

Thanks for this book review. It made me want to go and buy the book as a resource. However, I’m waiting for the companion volume: “Failed Projects.” I’d write it, but I don’t have any relevant experience…

Back in the dotcom heyday in the agency world there was a real spirit of openness that I had not experienced in my previous corporate work environments. The “post mortems” were brilliantly illuminating, because they were full of information you could really use. Unlike information that will be useful the next time I invent the Ipod… It’s what I loved about Guy Kiyosaki’s book “Before You Quit Your Job” (which my wife was unpleasantly surprised to see me reading 4 years after starting my consulting practice). It’s the failures that make it interesting. I’m not talking about failures like “I was too lazy to research new ways to solve this problem” or “It was the client’s fault.” But reality-show scenarios about ambitious attempts that have resulted in failure, like, “The project had 6 IA’s and 10 graphic designers, and the comps were lapping the wireframes, so we ended up having to do rework that cost us 2 weeks we didn’t have.” Or, “We did user testing to improve usability of the prototype, but we should have done in-store ethnography, because the sales associates have a handwritten notebook that nobody told us about that easily trumped the online system, and we ended up with less than 20% user adoption the first 90 days after launch.” Or “We decided to implement SAP, Omniture, and Documentum at the same time. We never knew what hit us.” Stories of pain that teach a lesson, so they don’t have to be repeated.

Of course there are liability issues and very few books have the candor of a closed meeting. Maybe something like a UX version of PostSecret (http://postsecret.blogspot.com/) would do the trick. Imagine the postcard secret: “I was the client partner on a big e-commerce project. I ignored the timelines the track leads gave me. I just filled in the number the client gave me and worked backwards from there.”

Victor Lombardi — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 21:13:16 GMT

Thank you for such a review that goes beyond the book’s content to put the topic in context. I hope to see more reviews like this that strive to become educational vehicles themselves and not just product reports.

Andrew Otwell — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 01:51:01 GMT

I’m glad to see another critical review of Designing Interactions. You’ve hit on many of the points I made in my review of it last November.

But frankly, I think you’re being much too nice. Huge sections of this book are garbage—the section on Google is just recapitulating the Larry/Sergey PR myths. Much of it is very sloppily edited, and the interview format is a huge crutch to pad out the text. The best that can be said about the book is that it’s large, and has lots of great pictures.

I think Moggridge’s failure to be crystal clear about his relationship to IDEO and to the many people interviewed in the book is deeply unethical. He doesn’t mention he *founded IDEO* anywhere in the text, for pete’s sake! Come on. I’m ashamed of MIT Press for allowing that to pass.

That he works so hard to make everything here seem like the outcome of “natural” iterative processes is so biased, so much part of Silicon Valley culture of the 1970’s-1990’s that I’m sure he doesn’t even notice it. It’s naked mythologizing, not historical research.