Joel Orr's World

Why Products Fail:
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?