Design Lessons from the World's Biggest Flops

Key Insights

Great products can fail due to experience failures, where user frustration outweighs technical excellence.
Systematic post-mortem analyses help identify root causes of product flops.
Applying the scientific method to product design leads to better understanding of customer behavior and needs.
Learning from failures is crucial for innovation and future product success.
Customer-centric design and iterative testing can prevent experience failures.

References

Brown, T. (2009). Change by Design. Harper Business.
Martin, R. L. (2009). The Design of Business. Harvard Business Press.
Lawson, B. (2006). How Designers Think. Routledge.
Cross, N. (2011). Design Thinking. Berg.
IDEO. (2015). The Field Guide to Human-Centered Design. IDEO.org.

Design Lessons from the World's Biggest Flops - Part 3: Stop Lying to Yourself! Why the Scientific Method is Your Product's Best Friend

Design Lessons from the World's Biggest Flops 1 Your Product Works, But Your Customers Hate It: The Secret to 'Experience Failure' 2 The Pilot's Secret: 3 Ways to Turn Your Failures into Future Success 3 Stop Lying to Yourself! Why the Scientific Method is Your Product's Best Friend ← Series Home We are all prone to self-deception. This is perhaps the most difficult, and most human, obstacle to successful product development. When you’ve poured your nights and weekends into an idea, you fall in love with it. You become emotionally invested. And that emotional investment is exactly what Victor Lombardi warns against in Why We Fail, because it breeds bias—the silent killer of objectivity. ...

Design Lessons from the World's Biggest Flops - Part 2: The Pilot's Secret: 3 Ways to Turn Your Failures into Future Success

Design Lessons from the World's Biggest Flops 1 Your Product Works, But Your Customers Hate It: The Secret to 'Experience Failure' 2 The Pilot's Secret: 3 Ways to Turn Your Failures into Future Success 3 Stop Lying to Yourself! Why the Scientific Method is Your Product's Best Friend ← Series Home Every great professional field—from aviation to medicine—treats failure not as a source of shame, but as a source of invaluable data. When a plane crashes, an entire team of experts descends upon the wreckage to determine the exact sequence of events, isolate the root cause, and then mandate new procedures globally. When a patient dies on the operating table, doctors perform a post-mortem not to assign blame, but to extract lessons that save the lives of future patients. ...

Design Lessons from the World's Biggest Flops - Part 1: Your Product Works, But Your Customers Hate It: The Secret to 'Experience Failure'

Design Lessons from the World's Biggest Flops 1 Your Product Works, But Your Customers Hate It: The Secret to 'Experience Failure' 2 The Pilot's Secret: 3 Ways to Turn Your Failures into Future Success 3 Stop Lying to Yourself! Why the Scientific Method is Your Product's Best Friend ← Series Home The Silent Killer in the Digital Age If you are a builder, an entrepreneur, or even just a consumer, you’ve likely felt the sting of a product that should have succeeded but didn’t. You’ve seen a brilliant concept, executed with technical precision, that simply vanished from the marketplace. Why? The hardware was impeccable. The code was flawless. The servers never crashed. The common wisdom used to be that products failed when they broke. But in our modern, hyper-connected world, a more insidious killer is at work: Experience Failure. ...

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