Description:

Victor Lombardi, author of the book Why We Fail, spent the past two years researching websites and consumer electronics that were successfully launched and hailed as great designs, but failed unexpectedly when people used them, such as Google Wave, Pownce, and Microsoft's Zune. Victor found a set of distinct patterns of failure that we can use to identify the customer experience risk in our own products.

Victor will discuss:

• The difference between design and the customers' experience
• Why understanding your customers' experience is increasingly important
• Case studies of well-designed products with undesirable experiences
• Patterns of experience failure
• How we can avoid customer experience failure in our own work

About Victor Lombardi

Victor helps organizations design products and build businesses that offer the best possible consumer experience. He does this by combining his liberal arts education and technology industry work into a perspective that is both practical and human.

Victor began his career in IT on the help desk, where he daily witnessed poor design and helped customers overcome it. Progressing to system administrator, he learned how networks, servers, and websites actually work by building them. Transitioning to become an interface designer, he worked for a decade contributing to more than 40 software and Internet products for organizations such as General Electric, Cisco, J.P. Morgan, and the Southern Poverty Law Center.

He's coached teams at Reed Elsevier and Rodale through the entire product development process, and helped turn around a failing media business at Fox Mobile Group through the development of a new web platform and mobile apps.

He's passionate about learning and sharing what he learns: He earned a master's degree in music technology from New York University and a bachelor's degree in journalism from Rutgers University, co-founded the Information Architecture Institute and the Overlap conference, and taught at the Parsons School of Design and the Pratt Institute. He's also written a book, Why We Fail: Real Stories and Practical Lessons from Experience Design Failures.

Finally, Victor walks the walk by developing his own product, Nickel, with the goal of making personal financial planning accessible to everyone.