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.

In the world of experience design, Victor Lombardi argues that we must adopt this same unforgiving rigor. We need to stop sweeping failed products under the rug and instead adopt systematic methods for dissecting them. As the famous saying goes: “Success is a poor teacher. Failure is the best.” But only if you know how to read the lesson plan.

Here are the three systematic steps, inspired by the book’s principles, that will transform your setbacks into a powerful source of future success:

1. Implement a Mandatory “Experience Post-Mortem”

When a product or feature fails to gain traction, an immediate and unbiased review must take place. This cannot be a meeting where the team simply vents; it must be a formal, documented process that answers critical questions:

  • The Intent vs. The Reality: What was the ideal experience we designed for? How did the actual user experience—captured through metrics, interviews, and logs—deviate from that ideal?
  • The Critical Events: What were the exact steps in the user journey where the experience became confusing, frustrating, or undesirable? Was it the onboarding flow? The payment screen? The error message? Pinpoint the moment of failure with surgical precision.
  • The False Assumption: Every design decision rests on an assumption about user behavior. What was the central hypothesis that proved utterly false? Did you assume users would read the instructions? Did you assume they would check a certain box? Identifying the false assumption is the key to preventing a repeat error.

A post-mortem ensures the team moves past emotional self-defense (“It was a bad quarter!”) and focuses on verifiable causation (“The data shows 85% of users dropped off at step three because the button was incorrectly labeled.”)

2. Ban the Blame Game: The Fault Is in the Design, Not the User

The single most destructive reaction to Experience Failure is to blame the customer. Phrases like, “The users just didn’t get it,” or “It was too innovative for them,” are forms of intellectual denial. They relieve the product team of responsibility, and worse, they blind the team to the truth.

Lombardi stresses a crucial rule of design: If a significant number of users are having a problem, the problem is with the design, not the users.

Experienced designers operate under this core tenet: The user is never wrong. If the user is confused, the design is confusing. If the user takes the wrong path, the design offered the wrong path.

This shift in perspective is liberating. By removing the ability to blame the user, the team is forced to look inward, examining the interface, the instructions, the language, and the emotional tone of the product. This creates a culture of intellectual honesty and true problem-solving. Failure ceases to be a personal critique and becomes a powerful, focused engineering problem that can be solved.

3. Standardize and Socialize the Lessons Learned

A lesson learned by one team member in one project is an experience failure waiting to happen on the next one. The key to turning failure into success is standardization.

All the insights gained from your Post-Mortems must be documented in a central, accessible knowledge base. This goes beyond traditional documentation. This is a “Museum of Mistakes”—a reference manual of errors that everyone, from the newest hire to the most seasoned veteran, must review before launching a new feature.

This standardization acts as an organizational immune system. It ensures that the knowledge gained from a costly mistake on a mobile app is automatically applied to a future website redesign. By sharing the lessons—the context, the false assumption, and the corrective action—you leverage the high cost of the initial failure for infinite future benefit.

The truth is, failure is inevitable. But repeating the same failure is optional. By adopting the systematic, rigorous, and intellectually honest approach of a pilot or a surgeon, you can guarantee that every flop becomes a foundation for future success.