Gabby Hon,
I think you are slightly unfair to companies. Quite a lot do want to have a holistic, long-term view. It’s just that they are only able to fund projects on a fix-it-once, when-I-pay-this-money-the-problem-must-be-gone-forever basis.

This also doesn’t take into account staff turnover; which can often be great with in-house teams therefore leaving the possibility that you’ll actually have more ‘in-house knowledge’ banked with your agency than your own staff.

Excellent read.

Question; In your opinion. What are names of some agencies/consultancies/companies that are doing the activity/user based design ?

Thanks in advance,

Take care,

P.S. Love to see more YouTube videos of yours

How these businesses managers, and the like, try to identify themselves and their objectives to other people (consumers) is something only THEY can own and modify at quickly if asked.

These days, many executives like to “switch gears” because they feel that their “instinct” tells them they need to. Skilled and informed managers need to be able to help and encourage such a shift OR discourage it depending on what they’ve learned from being as close to the consumer mind set as possible. And agencies, just by their nature are never as close to one brand’s consumer as hopefully that brand is, or better be.

Nice one Gabby

rgds,
Dan

“But the long-term, in-depth execution has to come from within. The company has to make the commitment to investing on their own.”

Agree and a large part of what we do should be about building UX strength/capability inside the business. At the end of the day, they should own it.

Perhaps we are also assuming that the UX industry in general is keeping up with market demands for UX in and around:

* New waves of people entering UX
* Growth in interest/demand in the term “UX” but not enough professional maturity in supply (hard to find good people)
* Lack of training on soft skills required (perhaps)
* Confusion from our buyers about what is required to make up a UX team or form a UX strategy
* Agencies (who may not have come from a UCD, UX, IXD, Usability) background now in the market to sell those services without having adequate skill sets to back it up.

rgds,
Dan

As a consultant, my goals for every project include (but certainly are not limited to) the following two things:

1. Educate the client on the issues they need to focus on as much as possible.
2. Leave the client with a strategy and direction and vision that will serve to guide their decisions in the future.

The fact that, yes, I will eventually leave a project, is something that bothers me a great deal. My goal is not to swoop in and save the day, but rather turn those who stay into superheroes. I don’t make products better, I make people better. If agency staff are not doing this, they are most certainly prone to becoming guilty of everything you said here. But if they care about the long-term outcome, they’re leaving clients with much more than deliverables and innovations. They’re leaving clients with a path to better decisions.

1. Your divisions of some of the design “styles,” as you refer to them, are a little too black and white to be thorough.

First, for example, in your view of activity-focused design, you assume that all activities take great lengths of time to understand. This is false; not all activities — including the photo-sharing activity you cited — are as time-consuming as you make them out to be.

Second, your view of self-design is that it is the result of teams designing for themselves, and that it is a “low-end” approach, the conclusion being that self-design is essentially always bad. But self-design can be a direct result of activity-focused research. Consider it an analogy to first-person journalism, in which a journalist immerses himself/herself into a situation and then reports on it from the inside out. Researching an activity in this way, one can then design with an inside perspective while still making the service’s real users the focus of the design decisions. “Self-design,” in other words, doesn’t have to mean “selfish design,” it can mean designing for users from a first-person perspective.

But then, this is a semantic debate. My version of self-design and yours could just as easily have different labels. But if so, then you’ve left at least one style out of your article on design styles, and it’s one which blurs and smudges and erases the lines you tried so diligently to draw.

2. You said: “Experience-focused design is even more difficult. The designs often require changes at touch points all over the organization.”

In this line, you’re essentially positing that if an agency can’t do “experience-focused design” (I love this term, by the way) that affects an entire organization, then the agency can’t do it at all. If the agency can’t achieve the business understanding and political clout to drive far-reaching change, it can’t affect anything at all. This is, of course, ridiculous. Agencies affect all kinds of experiences every single day. The problem is not that they can’t do experience-focused design, it’s that what they think is far-reaching is really just a sliver of the complete experience. A single app is not an entire company. A single call center is not an entire business. Agencies can and frequently do positively affect user experiences. They just don’t typically affect every aspect of those experiences.

Kudos for being provocative. The world needs provocation. I just hope that your readers’ pursuit of the truth never ends, because then their (now current) world view is screwed.

Part of the reason I created mental model diagrams was as a way to preserve the user-focused research, and even have a place to capture a few team experiences with customers. I’ve seen these diagrams help the effort gain momentum, spread knowledge to different divisions, and focus the design decision process. (Yeah, tooting my own horn.)

Every time I see a new design, approach, or bright and shiny object I wonder how long it will last and whether it will make its way to any other areas of the site. I’ve found the larger the site, the lower the chance the design will go anywhere–no matter how beneficial it is.

But there are those rare Website teams that have the right headset for successfully using design firms. They are very selective about when to use them, who they hire, and the project’s exit strategy. These teams understand that Websites are an evolution, not a revolution, and use design firms accordingly. As a result their sites consistently deliver useful innovations and a solid user experience.

But I think the we all need to come to a mutual understanding about this. Yes, Agencies practice plenty of unintended design, self design and some genius design.

And that’s just fine.

Especially fine for sites that need to lay some kind of foundation, and lay it down relatively quickly. Clients should walk into relationships with this understanding. If their site is a long term value proposition, that value will come later when there is time to iterate on Activity or User-focused design. You hire an agency to build the thing to iterate on. I love @Raul’s “it doesn’t start until it’s finished.” I will be stealing that.

The problem is both that agencies sell the idea that they can do a job properly out of the gate and clients expect that to be true. Agencies need to stop selling it and Clients ned to stop buying it.

If Agencies sold self/genius design for what it was and if clients understood its value we’d all be better for it.

You can’t really help a client until you’ve spent months with them and learned their business inside out and gotten to know their customers. You’re dead on when you say agencies can’t do that; by their very nature they’re fundamentally flawed.

Ideally I’d want an agency that works for at most 3-4 clients at a time, on long term contracts for many years at a time, giving them time to do real design. But that’s often not financially viable, and part of the reason is because clients don’t really understand that they need this. They think you hire an agency to sprinkle faerie dust and once they’re done, everything’s suddenly better. The problem is that you need to sustain the improvements. And if you hired an agency because they can do that, why do you assume you can suddenly do it once they’re gone? That kind of skill set doesn’t transfer by proximity.

And please stop doing that; it tickles.