SharedBook: On Demand

Failures - the highway to success

“The greatest barrier to success is the fear of failure.” -- Sven Goran Eriksson
No one likes failures. Myself included. Yet, part of growing up is learning to accept those failures, to accept those mistakes that we do, learn from them, and move forward.
When we started SharedBook, Yossie Hollander, our founder, kept on telling me he wants me to take risks. He kept on telling me that I haven’t failed enough in my life. And I didn’t understand what he meant.

A few months later, I made my biggest mistake in SharedBook, and I was devastated. Truth be told, I didn’t feel like I failed, I felt like I was a failure. Yossie was kind enough to call me and congratulate (!!!) me, telling me it is an important lesson that will serve me for life. A few days later, as the lesson was well absorbed, I understood what he meant back then when we started 

“Failure is the tuition you pay for success.” -- Walter Brunell
As you’ve probably realized by now, if you’ve read my previous posts, I am also an enthusiastic triathlete. And last week, I tried a new approach in the swim lag of a triathlon, and failed, miserably. In fact, I found myself all alone in the sea, the last one to get out of the water, and it hurt. Even after I biked well and ran well and won a nice trophy, I still felt miserable.

And then it got me thinking: what went wrong? What do I need to change in my process? What to I need to change in my training? What do I need to change in my racing strategy?

Quite a few lessons I’ve learned from this incident.  I don’t know how, I don’t know when, but one day, when I’ll be able to make a great swim lag in a triathlon, I am sure I’ll remember to attribute the success to last week’s race.

“We seem to gain wisdom more readily through our failures than through our successes. We always think of failure as the antithesis of success, but it isn't. Success often lies just the other side of failure.” -- Leo F. Buscaglia
This week was extremely busy in SharedBook R&D. OK, I’ll be honest: it was hectic, sometimes it even felt nothing less than chaotic. Our team here is well experienced with this; we try, it doesn’t work, we learn from this mistake, try a different approach, and so on. Someone here once call this a “continuous post-mortem”. It is an ongoing learning process that eventually leads us to success.

And this week was no exception: we tried, we failed, we learned from this failure, and we tried again. People pulled all-nighters, worked hard, and then worked harder. And with such determination and diligence success was bound to come.

It is times like this make me really proud to be part of the SharedBook team!

“If you're not failing every now and again, it's a sign you're not doing anything very innovative.” -- Woody Allen

Dario, Benny and Rona – I’d like to take this chance and thank you for all your hard work, efforts and continuous learning process that eventually yielded successful results.
Thanks!

An Expert for a Client

A few years back during a meeting I gave feedback on a proposed website design.  I spoke as a potential user and was attempting to point out some possible pitfalls.  The President of a company I was consulting for asked "Is this your personal opinion as a user, or as an advocate of the user?". Not an easy question as the lines are so fuzzy.   Clearly this question is at the core of web design decision making.

One of the major rules of website design is to NOT build for yourself.  There is a saying that "the lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client".  In my line of work, the saying should go "the designer who builds a website for himself has an expert as a client".  And it is just as foolish.

When you design a website to satisfy your own needs as a user, your expertise will constantly pull you in a potentially dangerous direction.

You are engaged.  The product is your job.  You feel passionately about it (or are at least paid to be) and your willingness to read about the product, consider its merits, and reach conclusions are a given.  Unfortunately you would be lucky if your customers are one tenth as engaged.  Not because they don't care, but because they don't know.

You know the product.  Exactly what it is and (maybe more importantly) what it isn't.  Your customers know neither.  And worse, many of them think they know what the product is and somehow have it wrong.  As a designer you have precious little time to help clarify this.

You understand the process.  You know what needs to happen and when.  Moreover, you know what is difficult to successfully accomplish and what isn't.  Your users aren't insiders like you.  They don't know your operations.  Your difficulties and triumphs are completely invisible to them. They will likely assume some things are easy that are in fact complex.  They won't give them a second thought, meanwhile your success might depend on it.

You look at it every day.  This causes a bias that work for you or against you.  You know where to look and what to ignore.  You may miss that your design is focusing the user on the wrong spot.  You also might think your design is stale and "yesterday" - but perhaps that's because you spent all of yesterday staring at it.

Nothing can replace user feedback.  The point is that the site is built for them - because without them you don't have a product.