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.
This is the profound realization at the heart of Victor Lombardi’s essential book, Why We Fail: Learning from Experience Design Failures. The book argues that the rules of failure have changed. Products today don’t fail in technical ways; they fail in experiential ways.
Imagine a state-of-the-art smart coffee maker. It brews coffee at the perfect temperature, on a schedule you set via an app, and even reorders beans when you’re low. Technically, it is a triumph of engineering. But what if setting the schedule requires 15 confusing steps in the app? What if reordering beans creates an account you never asked for? What if the notifications you get when the coffee is done are intrusive and annoying?
The coffee maker works, but the act of using it is deeply undesirable. You toss it in the closet and return to your simple French press. That, in a nutshell, is Experience Failure. The product is usable, but the experience is unsatisfying, confusing, or frustrating.
Distinguishing Failure: Technical vs. Experiential
To truly learn, we must first correctly diagnose the ailment.
- Technical Failure (The Old Killer): This is the classic, straightforward failure. The engine stalls. The bridge collapses. The software crashes. The product is physically or functionally incapable of performing its intended primary task. These failures are usually easy to spot and diagnose; they require engineering solutions.
- Experience Failure (The Modern Killer): The product performs its primary task perfectly (the car drives, the app loads), but the secondary—and often more important—tasks that surround the core function are miserable. This includes confusing onboarding, friction in a checkout process, a confusing menu layout, or poor customer support integration. These failures require design and empathy solutions.
Lombardi meticulously shows that because so many of our modern devices and platforms are fundamentally experiential products, their fate rests entirely on the quality of the human interaction. A social media platform, for instance, isn’t a failure because its server is down; it’s a failure if its interface becomes so complicated, or its community so toxic, that users simply stop showing up.
The Cost of Denial
The greatest tragedy of Experience Failure is the cost of its denial. Teams that pour millions into a technically superior product often refuse to acknowledge the subtle flaw in the experience itself. They rationalize, saying, “The market wasn’t ready,” or “The users didn’t understand our innovation.”
This is a disastrous mental trap. It prevents the team from looking closely at the true root cause—the design of the human interaction—and instead leads them to repeat the exact same experiential mistakes in their next venture.
Why We Fail delivers a crucial wake-up call: The only way to move forward is to recognize that design excellence is no longer just about function; it’s about frictionless, desirable interaction.
The central, urgent question for every innovator is no longer, “Can we build it?” but rather, “Will people love using it?” If the answer to the second question is a reluctant “No,” all the technical brilliance in the world won’t save you. The shift in focus is not from working product to broken product, but from working product to beloved product. Learn to spot the subtle, painful truth of Experience Failure, and you will unlock the lessons that transform your next idea from a flop into a hit.