For all your new ideas and implementation, there is a 95% chance that it will fail.

Ego and the need to be right is one of the most problematic traits in any businessman,  designer or venture. With 8 years of solid business starting from scratch and 20 years of design experience, here is one of the most important thing that I learned.

At start, with my first projects,  I was almost hypnotically certain that my ideas are great and that everybody (target audience) will use it.

Then, failure after failure, blaming various factors, competition, lack of money, etc.

With all those failures morale breaks over time but you have to move forward with your business.

Lately, and with experience, I noticed that only one of twenty ideas on average is successful.

For example, I tried to promote my webpage and increase visibility. Things I tried and was certain that it will work:

• LinkedIn articles
• linkedIn connection requests
• cold email reach to clients
• blog writing (failed because of wrong SEO)
• podcast videos of interviews with clients
• add more portfolio works
• redesigned my webpage (worked only to gain more trust)
• add videos on Dribbble
• add portfolio work to Dribbble
• create a food concept animation
• create a fashion concept animation
• create nutrition concept animation
• publish app portfolio videos
• fashion concept animation video (worked moderately)
• Google SEO inbound marketing WORKED and the visibility is much higher

With all those experience I learned that you cannot know how one idea will work out. Most of the time I learned what does NOT work out for the goal. But, at a cost of so much time and energy.

The saying goes, smart learn from other experiences and dumb on his own experience.

So, maybe I can inspire you and help you to cut shortcut on your way to business success.

How is this related to UX design?

Well, a lot of our clients, especially novice, are sure that their vision is a winner. Either startup or an app from an established company.

Clients that are too positive about their ideas never create a successful product because they lean towards confirmation of their idea at all costs. They do not even test the idea with target audience and build a fully functional product that rarely someone use.

We at Supersuper always recommend the UX design triangle:

Triangle with the various examples of overlay - one agency is more focused on client needs, one is on their own, etc.

A lot of agencies are usually only focused on bringing the client vision and not the full triangle.

With the rise of various Lean UX, MVP and agile methodologies, the full triangle comes to the sight for successful products.

Read more about the Super super triangle here: https://www.supersuperagency.com/ux-agency-london

In our agency, for every solution, we internally try several potential solutions and choose the best one. And on one page we implement around 20 solutions. Then, to test the triangle, we build a fully functional interaction prototype in a couple of hours. With a prototype, we can test the design quickly with a surrounding that resembles 80% of the real product. The design in this phase is still black and white medium/high fidelity wireframes.

We review the prototype and interaction with other pages with a client first. The client usually has some comments and makes slight adjustments to the design from a stakeholder perspective and we make sure that the design follows his overall vision and goals.

Then, the page is reviewed by the end customer in usability and UX testing session.

With an end user, we usually get completely unexpected answers. For example, we tested the student population for one mobile app one year ago: https://www.supersuperagency.com/project/fashion-ios-app
The fashion students all wanted hashtags to be present in the app, something that either we or the stakeholder could never think of. The tested users usually give a great insight and many ideas even on how we can solve some design challenges better.

The solution where we build interaction prototype and use medium/high fidelity wireframes basically test the solutions before the client will invest substantially bigger budget into the development and not to even mention marketing. This lean approach during the design can save around 80% of the overall budget and improve the chances of your product success.

With this approach we test 15-20 different solutions during the design phase with the UX triangle in mind and filter out the single best solution that will work 10x faster and with 10x fewer expenses. Imagine if you could achieve business success 10x faster.

How this applies to business and marketing

With experience, we learned how to optimize our time. We never fully develop one idea, we test the ideas with simple lean approach.

For example, one promotional idea is to put site speed checker on our website. With the old way of thinking, I would be sure that this will work, Spend 3 days on searching for the right script and 5 days to implement it.

With, new lean way of thinking I just create one simple test landing page in 1 day, email and website form without any real script. After the user submit the request we send him the report manually.

This way, we can test how many potential serious client leads will use this option and after 2-3 month see if there is any point of developing this technology.

The result of the lean approach is that we just test the hypothesis and scrap them as soon as they are not confirmed. For example, you will test 19 hypothesis with simple methods quickly and reach 1 solution that works 10x faster.

To summarize

So, to conclude, with a big ego and too positive approach, be prepared for 95% failures. If you take the lean approach the failure rate will remain the same, but, you will reach those 5% of successful solutions much faster.

We always recommend that you test your ideas with real users, this is something that is invaluable, saves you time and cost (especially development).

Do not be feared of failure, embrace it as a positive learning experience but test with lean methods your every idea and do not develop it fully. This allows you to experiment, learn and at the same time not affect your resources such as time and money to a great extent.