Why Products Fail

Author and Microsoft researcher Bill Buxton proposes a solution to the tech industry's software development problem

by Jessie Scanlon

Bill Buxton

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Sketching User Experience is, nominally, a book about product design. But it would be just as accurate to say that it's a book about software development, or, more generally, about the often broken process of bringing new products to market, with examples ranging from the iPod to an orange juicer.

"Hardly a day goes by that we don't see an announcement for some new product or technology that is going to make our lives easier, solve some or all of our problems, or simply make the world a better place," writes Bill Buxton in the preface to his book. "Few of these products survive, much less deliver on their typically over-hyped promise." Why, Buxton asks, are we not learning from these expensive mistakes? Why are we not fundamentally rethinking the process of product development?

Sketching User Experience (Morgan Kaufmann, 2007) is a book born of the frustration of an industry insider. Principal researcher at Microsoft Research (MSFT) since late 2005, Buxton has spent decades in the trenches of computer science—including a stint at the storied Xerox PARC (XRX)—and at the front lines of the software industry.

Not Just Improved, New

It was after eight and a half years as chief scientist at Alias Wavefront (now owned by Autodesk (ADSK)) that Buxton threw up his hands. During that time, he reveals over lunch in Boston, the company introduced only two products of which he's genuinely proud—an interactive digital corkboard called the Portfolio Wall and Alias Sketchbook. Yet he came to realize, he says, that the problem wasn't with Alias Wavefront—the whole software industry was broken.

While companies were very good at what Buxton calls "N+1" development, or pumping out improved versions of existing products, most were quite bad at developing the new products that are essential for sustainable long-term growth. He points to Adobe (ADBE), one of the largest software companies in the world, as one example of the industry's modus operandi: most new products are the result of mergers or acquisitions.

Buxton left Alias Wavefront in 2002 and spent the following years thinking about the problem with traditional software—and more broadly product—development, and how to fix it. Sketching User Experience is the result of that effort. It's a book written primarily for designers, but one that could and should be read by any engineers and executives who share Buxton's desire for better and more successful products.

Holistic Approach

And while Buxton's insights are geared towards companies making software or products that depend on software, the book is jargon-free, and most anyone in the business of creating products will learn from it.

"My belief is that one of the most significant reasons for the failure of organizations to develop new software products in-house is the absence of anything that a design professional would recognize as an explicit design process," writes Buxton.

The aim of his book is to help change this situation. He argues for a holistic approach to experience-based design, showing how the weakness of software product development can be complemented by the strengths of traditional product design and vice versa. But mostly, he argues strongly for an explicit and distinct design process that's integrated into the larger organization and supported by executive leadership.

New Levels of Complexity

He illustrates the importance of executive support with a little-mentioned fact about Apple (AAPL): The design team that created the iPod, the iMac, and all of the other products that punctuated Apple's rise, is the same team that created all of the products released during the company's long slide from Sculley through Amelio.