‘It meant something about who I am’: what the lived experience of failure teaches us about designing for goal setting

Abstract

Setting personal goals is a complex process dependent on appropriate skills, motivation, and context, making failure a common part of goal pursuit. While recent Human-Computer Interaction research has begun to address this complexity by exploring qualitative and long-term goals, little is known about how failure shapes users' goals, emotions, and sense of identity. To address this, we conducted an in-depth study of failure to explore new approaches for supporting users when they fail. Through 17 semi-structured interviews, we examined how and why people fail in their personal goals. We found that long-term aspirations and identity strongly shape goals, creating challenges in choosing appropriate strategies to achieve them. In addition, this connection made failure emotionally intense. Goals that reflected deeply held values were highly motivated but also prompted severe negative reactions when they failed. Rather than adjusting their strategies, many ascribed failure to their personal shortcomings and reattempted the same ineffective approaches, creating cycles of repeated failure. Based on this understanding of the causes and impacts of failure, we discuss new design approaches for technologies to support goal setting, failure diagnostics, and adaptation by prompting reflection on emotions and external factors, making ties to identity explicit, and regularly re-evaluating current goals.