Permission to fail
Because you have to.
Sometimes you win, sometimes you learn
That’s the most important things I will remember from Graphic Design classes (big up Joackim). If you always win, then you never learn. If you never learn, then you’ve probably lost a good opportunity to be better at what you’re doing.
People don’t like to fail or to lose. You don’t like to lose, me neither. That’s normal, you would like to lose 7–1 at Fifa? But there is in my perspective something worse than failing. That thing is failing again, and again, etc. (This and the moment when you open my fridge and it’s empty.) But what if it’s a part of the process, of a cycle?
“The emotional journey of creating anything great” by John Saddington shows us the importance of failing. All the thing that we create step through the “Dark swamp of despair” where we are the more able to give up or fail. And like written on the infographic, this is inevitable and perhaps necessary.
So here’s an idea, what about to learn from a mistake? In that case, failing can become something more educative. The failure, let’s do something with it.
It’s okay if your product sucks
Sometimes it’s a good thing. Well, it’s better if you can tell it at an early stage of the process when it’s still possible to apply your new learnings.
But what do the words “fail” and “learn” mean? Let’s find out:
- Fail: Be unsuccessful in achieving one’s goal.
- Learn: Gain or acquire knowledge/skill by study, experience, and/or being taught.
— thank you Google
Well then let’s imagine that you have to create an awesome App. In a well-organized workflow, you’ve made your searches, create personas, used post-its meaningfully. Also you’ve created personas, wireframes and everything else needed. And you are finally ready to test a prototype for the first user test of the product. Until here, you feel confident, so does the client. You’re in a comfortable zone.
But then, while testing your prototype someone says: “I don’t get it”. Then a second one is looking for a call to action that you thought was obvious. Another one is not able to execute a gesture that seemed basic to you.
Well, you get it. Your prototype won’t go further on the path to the MVP. You feel like you have lost, also you think that you had one job to simplify user’s life and it kinda sucks… Oh come on, admit it.
But what if I told you that this is not a failure? Well, get ready… It’s maybe not. It’s a learning. So what can we learn from it?
Well at first you can learn that you suck at designing prototype(no, just kidding, thank you if you are still here). You learned that there is an importance of testing a product at an early stage of the project, which means you gain a bit more experience. Better that than testing it once on the App Store when it’s public to everyone.
Also if well organized, the user test will give you some feedbacks (that you will have to interpret) about your target and interface or whatever. In that case, you learn by studies and results.
Then you can tell if your idea was good or not. If your idea was well executed or not, and finally see why you obtained a not-so-good outcome. From there you can go further in a perspective of learning instead of failing.
If you never fail, you probably never learn.
Another example I can tell you is about one of my side projects, “Why we explore”. It has been well received by the web community, but wanna know how I struggled with it? Well let’s say that before creating an experimental blog about space, I had something else in mind. My very first idea was to create an experience between fiction and reality about the first world war. Almost the same, right? It took me 4 months before realising that it was not doable as I expected and was a complete failure. So I tried to “recycle” it into something completely different.
First try !
Haha… nope! During my studies (and hopefully still at work) I often heard:
The first good idea is usually not the good one.
I want to say that the “First try” does not exist in the real world. It would be too easy and if it was easy I’m not sure if I would be writing this article.
But don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that you can’t succeed on a first try (which depends on the client, his mood, your mood, your searches, etc). In a realistic process in a realistic work environment, you have to fail to find the right path. If I’m going on a certain path is not the right solution, then I know that I shouldn’t do it that way again. So I should know how to orientate myself.
Having bad ideas, bad prototypes, bad whatever lets us know how not to do it. And if we let the frustration/anger beside, we will be able to understand and learn from it. Also if I take your first good idea without looking for other good ones, how can I be sure that it’s the one?
But if we learn… can we really fail ?
Yes! mmmmh… in fact no, or maybe… I don’t know! In my opinion, it would depend on the capacity of each of us to learn and accept feedback from others. If I made a mistake, probably I didn’t know so I can’t be blamed, except if I murder someone, obviously. If I do it twice it’s because I have forgotten, or I was not sure, or I’m unlucky. But still, it’s okay.
On the other hand, if I repeat the same error 10 times, I’m probably not a “learning person”. (I heard this once, but can’t remember or find who said it.)
Quick outro
To conclude this article and to resume it, I just want to say: Don’t be scared of failure. Don’t be scared to try because of failure. Just fail and learn. It’s a part of the process and you will be better after that.
You’re still here? Thank you for reading my first article on Medium. I would like you to know that I will try to write more from now on. I will mainly share my point of view from some personal learnings in the UX and Interaction Design fields otherwise known as my daily life.
I will be glad to hear your feedback. By the way, I’m probably failing at writing this article. Feel free to share this post, follow me on Medium or on Twitter for more.
