97 Things Every UX Practitioner Should Know

Chapter 48. Be Wrong on Purpose

Skyler Ray Taylor

What if design acumen were measured not by how perfect your work is but by how willing you are to be wrong? Whether it’s with a client or within your team, an imperfect solution could be the catalyst that inspires your best ideas.

The Wrong Answer

I once spent a week with a client not making any progress on a cross-country delivery application. Our UX team needed to nail down the flow so we could begin wireframes, but the client was having trouble committing to what was in and what was out for the first generation of the product.

After days of pitching ever-expanding solutions and ending up in circular debates, I decided to attempt something new—instead of trying to be right only to get it wrong, what if I tried to be wrong in order to get it right? I intentionally started our next session by writing an incorrect assumption on the whiteboard. I wrote that the users of the app knew the exact time they would arrive at a given destination so they could send a manual alert for when the delivery was expected; in reality the system should calculate the arrival time based on their location and send automated notifications. The client and the design team pointed out the error and began to collaboratively make corrections. A healthy debate started, and soon the board was filled with arrows, circles, and dotted lines. By presenting something ...