Why I Created The UX Failure Deck

For several years I taught Mobile UX, UX Design, and Speculative Design as an adjunct instructor at Fordham University — Lincoln Center. Every semester I saw the same pattern. Students would design beautiful flows, thoughtful interfaces, and polished onboarding. Everything worked perfectly, but it only worked perfectly under one condition:

Nothing went wrong.

The designs assumed the user read everything carefully, followed every step, had perfect internet, and never made mistakes. In other words, they designed for the happy path. That makes sense — when you're learning design, you focus on making things work.

But here's the thing — it's not just students.

The longer I worked in UX and product design, the more I realized this pattern exists everywhere. Junior designers, senior designers, entire product teams — we all default to the happy path. Design critiques focus on what works. Stakeholder reviews celebrate polished flows. Edge cases get pushed to the backlog.

The real world is almost never a happy path.

• Users skip onboarding.
• They multitask between apps.
• They lose connection halfway through a task.
• They come back three weeks later and forget everything.
• They trust AI too quickly — or not at all.

And yet, most design conversations still revolve around how things work when everything goes right. Maybe it's the pessimist in me, but I've always been drawn to a different question: What could go wrong?

Not because I want things to fail — but because the best products are designed with failure in mind.

• They anticipate confusion.
• They handle mistakes gracefully.
• They protect trust when things break.
• They recover when systems don't behave perfectly.

That's how The UX Failure Deck was born.

It's a tool for anyone who designs digital products — students learning the craft, professionals shipping real features, design studios running critiques, and educators shaping the next generation of designers. Because no matter how experienced you are, edge cases, failure states, stressed users, and broken contexts still get overlooked.

That's where products fall apart. And that's where this deck comes in.