Tales of a Designer

Accepting Failure

Every day we see failure. It surrounds us. You see businesses come and go because of some things they did not do right. You see design fail because the designer(s) did something wrong to not accomplish the goal of the overall project in regards to it’s users, and so forth. But what happens when you do all of the work that you think is possibly necessary for a project, all of the research, design, and testing, but yet the project still fails?

In a previous post, I mentioned that I worked on a year long web project, and that one of the most important things I learned was the importance of writing for the web. I often still look back to the project to pick out other things that I learned, and one of those things learned was accepting failure.

One of the main things that our design team was told at the beginning is that projects fail sometimes, and that sometimes it can be out of your control, due to politics or other things that the design team doesn’t have a handle on. To this day, the project that we worked on was one of the biggest, and most meaningful projects because of amount of information that I learned having to do with users, web standards, accessibility, etc.

We spent the whole year working on this project, doing the design, user testing, and hundreds of hours of research, and when it was time to impliment the design, we were told to halt, and that was it. We ran into a brick wall, and we weren’t able to finish all of the work that we had done, and all of a sudden the project was over. It failed.

Now it seemed fairly obvious that why we couldn’t finish the project was out of our control, but we had to accept the fact that the project was said and done. That was it. It was a little disappointing, but at the same time the amount of lessons that were learned in the project I still carry to this day. We were told not to sweat trying to find answers of why we couldn’t finish, but just to take what we learned and carry on.

Now that wasn’t the only time I’ve worked on a failed project that was out of my control, but it was the first, so I am glad that I have been trained to accept failure of a project with things out of my control, and I think that is something that is important to know how to handle. You never know when a project can be thrown out the window after all of the hard work you put into something…….especially in a corporate environment.

How important do you think it is to know how to accept failure on a project that is out of your control?