Below are my five biggest takeaways from the book for aspiring ecommerce UX designers, and insights on how we live out these ideas and boost creativity in our own work at The Good. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. Apply a Growth Mindset to Your Work<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
How many times have you been given a problem and thought or said \u201cI can\u2019t\u201d or \u201cthis won\u2019t work\u201d? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is a fixed mindset or the belief that intelligence or creativity are immutable characteristics that cannot be changed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This mindset limits us and makes us so afraid of failure or embarrassment that we avoid risks and end up sabotaging long-term opportunities simply because we are afraid to admit what we don\u2019t know. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conversely, a growth mindset is when you believe creativity and knowledge are like a muscle that must be trained over time with persistence. It gives us the chance to improve in small, incremental ways that add up big over time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
We encourage a growth mindset amongst our clients and our team by living out our core value<\/a> of \u201cMake Improvements Not Excuses.\u201d We are a team of lifelong learners who understand the value of growth through practice, not perfection. <\/p>\n\n\n\n A fixed mindset tells us that receiving critical feedback means you are not measuring up or have personally failed. However, a growth mindset allows us to take feedback as an opportunity to improve our work and grow in our discipline.<\/p>\n\n\n\n David and Tom Kelley write about failure a lot in Creative Confidence<\/em> as something to embrace rather than avoid. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Early failure in a project helps us find weaknesses and correct them in the innovation cycle. Owning a setback allows us to actually learn what to do differently in the future. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Psychologist Albert Bandura<\/a> discusses this in his work around curing phobias: giving people small successes to focus on can help them overcome limiting beliefs and build creative confidence. <\/p>\n\n\n\n An easy way to learn \u201cquick, easy, and cheap\u201d is through prototyping. Prototypes can be as rudimentary as a drawing on a napkin and as high fidelity as an interactive digital mockup. <\/p>\n\n\n\n They give us the latitude to quickly test ideas to understand the best pathway forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here\u2019s an example of a low fidelity mockup of a zoo app that I created in a course. Taking this first step gave me and my peers a starting point to work off of. <\/p>\n\n\n\n As we continued working on the prototype, we found weak points and areas for improvement that led us to the more polished version. Below you can see the high fidelity mockup of the same zoo app once we iterated on it as a team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n While the first version was far from perfect, it gave us ideas on how to improve and helped guide us to our final product. <\/p>\n\n\n\n When you approach challenges this way, failure is no longer a scary word but a part of the innovation process. <\/p>\n\n\n\n At The Good, we take it one step further when designing multivariate tests<\/a> for our clients. A failed test does not garner blame or frustration but is labeled a \u201clearner\u201d or an opportunity to iterate and improve an experience for the future. <\/p>\n\n\n\n2. Early Failure is a Key to Long-Term Success<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"prototype](\"https:\/\/thegood.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/image-258-1024x661.png\")
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