Transcript for this Podcast

I had the pleasure of talking with Brad Nunnally about the importance of failure to innovate; moving teams and individuals to new ideas and future successes.

I first met Brad at this year’s IDEA conference in Toronto. You can read his brilliant overview of the two day event over on Johnny Holland.

Part of the inspiration for his three part article on failure came from this video by Scott Berkun.

In Part One Brad discusses the importance of Retrospectives and Documenting Warning Signs to learn from past mistakes.

In Part Two he covers the opposing yet equally important issues of Assigning Blame and Highlighting the Success of others.

In Part Three Brad discusses why it’s so important to Embrace Failure and to also keep an Open Mind realizing that everyone makes mistakes.

In our conversation, Brad and I note quotes from other UX professionals around the world. Their feedback can be found on the Wiki I created for this podcast.

Many thanks to Eric Reiss, Jan Jursa, and Valeska O’Leary for sharing their insights on the Wiki and to Daniel Szuc and Christian Crumlish who dropped me an email with their thoughts.

I’d like to encourage others within and outside of the UX industries to build on the questions provided on the Wiki.

I think you’ll find those who have garnered the most success in their industry are the ones who have failed more often than not. They are the ones who have had the courage to keep pursuing ideas, evolving them over time to learn from mistakes and create an even greater product or service than originally imagined.

At events like the IA Summit and the Interaction Design conference, I think we should be discussing the topic of failure and not just with / amongst presenters but as a common conversational thread with all attendees.

As a suggestion I believe conference organizers should provide a space where people can write, sketch, and share past failures and lessons learned. I saw this idea when I attended the first annual VizThink conference.

In addition to most workshops providing attendees the opportunity to share via sketching (see image below), large whiteboards were set up in the pre-conference area allowing others to draw out ideas which, in turn, encouraged discussion amongst participants about the illustrations.

Most recently, at the first annual UX Australia conference, Oliver Weidlich discussed several examples of interface failure.

To hear his 10 minute talk about this presentation make your way over to the UX Australia Media page. You can also subscribe to all the shows through their iTunes subscription.