How to Kill a Perfectly Good Idea
The consequences of designing businesses and products based on assumption rather than research.
Long before I was a UX designer, I opened two artisan restaurants in San Francisco. The first one was far more successful than my co-founder or I could have ever imagined, resulting in nearly a 3x return on our initial investment within an 18-month period. The second, well, the second restaurant failed within a year.
For years I never could quite grasp why one restaurant was a huge success while the other a complete and utter failure. We had the same staff, the same menu, and roughly the same business plan, yet everything we did that worked at the first location, failed at the second. How could two similar strategies create such different results?
It wasn’t until years later when I began to pursue a career in UX design, that I came to the realization of the fatal error we made.
Before opening the first restaurant, we had conducted extensive research about our target audience. We tested our name, our logo, our menu, and our food quality. We interviewed neighbors, visited the competition, and scouted locations. We honed in on our concept to fit the culture of the neighborhood.
Our efforts paid off. Within a few months of opening we were fully profitable, a major feat for restaurants that usually takes two or more years to achieve.
Now, we could have just let things be — we were after all making profit and working comfortable hours — but success has a way of making you yearn for more.
So, we opened a second restaurant, one that was doomed from the start because we made that fatal error. We assumed.
We assumed that just because we had already opened one successful business we could open another just like it and bypass researching over again. We also assumed that we knew more about our users than they did about themselves.
Those assumptions killed us.
So, for educational purposes and some minor self-flagellation, here is a list of the assumptions we made that lead to our inevitable failure.
We assumed that more seating would mean more revenue.
The Data We Missed: In reviews, customers were stating that our small size was a major part of our allure. They also cited that loud noise on busy nights was one of their biggest pain points. Yet we insisted that this new restaurant have more seats than the last.
The Consequence: We overworked our kitchen beyond its capacity. Noise level went up, which means customer discomfort went up with it. We also lost our romantic charm of an intimate neighborhood gem.
We did not change our cuisine concept to match the neighborhood.
The Data We Missed: We failed to recognize that neighborhood was a party destination, full of night clubs, liquor stores, and late night cheap eats. We assumed the absence of an upscale restaurant meant there was a demand for one — quite the opposite actually.
The Consequence: There was no neighborhood demand for our dining experience. Most loyal customers were from other, further away neighborhoods. Our growth was therefore painfully slow.
We assumed that what we wanted, our guests would also want.
The Data We Missed: Our biggest sellers were always the lowest cost items, but we insisted we knew which items our guests would prefer and often replaced low-cost low-quality items with higher-quality higher-cost items.
The Consequence: We turned away and lost many diners over time who perceived our food to be too expensive.
As a UX designer, you learn quickly that assumptions are the Achilles heel of design. It can be tempting to assume that your experience and intuition are good enough to design a product for your user, but products fail when they are designed based on assumptions rather than evidence. Had we done our research for the second location, we might have had a fighting chance at success, but we denied ourselves that opportunity by assuming we knew what our “users” wanted.
