Bill Blogs in C#

More on interview questions

So, Dianne wanted to call my bluff on the “what’s your biggest failure?” question. If I want to ask the question, I should be willing to answer it:

Several years ago, I was working on a software game project aimed at small children (3 – 8 years old). One of the features was to navigate immediately to the home screen. It let the user go pick the next activity, no matter what he or she was doing at the time. We figured that this feature should be easily accessible and easy to remember, so we picked the space bar: Press the space bar, go to the home screen.

There was only one problem: little kids had a tendency to hit the space bar. A lot. See, it’s the biggest key on the keyboard, and it’s right in the middle, and closest to those small hands. We actually had some smaller children crying during our first user trials. They’d hit the space bar, promptly quitting the game they are currently enjoying.

That experience had us re-examine every navigation key, and rework quite a few of them.

What did I learn? Simply that we are not the user community for what we create. And, even when you recognize that, we still mess up because we miss important facets of our users’ experiences. We thought children would want the ‘home’ navigation key to be easy to get to. By picking the space bar, we certainly succeeded. But, we failed in our goal of making the game enjoyable for small children: We were causing frustration by making a certain action too easy to perform accidentally.

The point of these questions, in my not-so-humble opinion, is to try and assess someone’s potential for growth, and whether or not they have can be constructively self-critical. Anyone that really thinks their weaknesses are strengths, or doesn’t admit mistakes, can’t grow (professionally or personally). And, those folks that want to hide their mistakes, maybe by avoiding giving co-workers and managers the bad news that inevitably shows up during a project, will probably cause larger problems by delaying corrective action that could be taken.

I don’t expect perfect people, but I do want to work with people that will continue to improve themselves, their craft, and their contribution.

And, now that I’ve given away my answer, I need to come up with a new interview question to assess this.