Tag Archives: User Experience

UX in Digital Agencies is Fucked

In Ross Popoff-Walker’s post he said that UX design at digital agencies is fucked. This is a statement that has been made by quite a lot of people of late and I have to say I don’t agree. User Experience Design is not fucked within digital agencies. Digital agencies themselves are fucked. Now, it would be wrong to tar every agency with the same brush there are some who are successfully covering all aspects of digital development for their clients including applying the focus on users first into the clients services.

But here’s the thing. The problem is not that digital agencies are fucking up UX because they stack the front of every project with a period blocked out for UXD only to roll into the same waterfall method that has served them well in the past, regularly ignoring all the research and planning that has come from it. It is because they never changed their own business model to focus on user experience. A digital agency is a service model, one which means different things to different people, for me a digital agency constitutes any organisation who is capable of managing and leading projects across the digital spectrum. I’m not just talking about a websites, or a new web/native app. I am talking about end to end of the life cycle of your clients service or product. The agencies that perform this and do it well have staff numbers in the 100s, have departments that specialise in SEO, social media, Marketing, revenue, design, development, R&D, animation and 3D modelling to name probably only a smidgen of what these giant corps contain. Because of this they are able to offer a complete service, something that the lazy sales team will tell you as a client is ’360 service’. They are capable of completing development cycles that have a start an end and a loop. This is where user experience as with all development excels. The learning from doing, observing and refining. Lisa Reichelt produced one of my favourite presentations of recent years which centred on why most UX is shite. It’s a great example of this failing but from the focus point of the client, something which I will touch upon later.

This is why some agencies are failing to deliver the expectations of their clients and their clients users when it comes to developments, because UX is not about deciding how many pages you’re going to wireframe, neither is it about what the sitemap is going to look like, or that content must come first, it’s not even about user testing. User experience is about taking a look at a business as a whole and highlighting the parts which are fucked up and how they can be made more appealing to the intended audience. Yes we start it by looking at a website, but how many times have you visited a site that wasn’t bad or used a product that you liked only to be spoken to like an ass hole on the telephone or receive a letter that made you see red? The website you have needs to show your heart on your sleeve, people want transparency, honesty and integrity even if it is just for buying a book for five bucks on Amazon.

There are hundreds of people in the industry who will disagree with me, but I have always believed that if you want to have a great user experience then be prepared to scrap your business model and start again. Digital Agencies have spent the last decade expanding by tacking services on the sides. Pretty much every digital agency started off as a design company, whether web design or print design. At some point they got a developer, then Google started getting bigger and people wanted to be at the top of search rankings so then the agencies started hiring marketing teams to work on keywords and the like, then Flash boomed and it was animators, people with skills in this new action script language and so on and so on and so on, forever expanding by shoe-horning other bits into a space where the people at the top only ever knew one thing; design.

Now we reach today. 2012 and one of the largest buzz words for the last two years has been UX. I have spent the last few years listening to clients continually say ‘we want to have a good ux’ only to feel underwhelmed or disappointed in projects when they don’t get the ideal solution I have suggested because their business model doesn’t allow for the best possible experience. The agencies themselves suffer from the same fate and they will continue to do so until they accept that everything they knew when they started is today, wrong.

example of the Basecampe Everything page

Welcome to the new Basecamp, now with less features

example of the Basecampe Everything page

Congratulations to 37 Signals for completing nerfing one of the industries beloved tools Basecamp. I guess there was a real itch to do something over at 37 Signals and attention drew in on the project management tool of choice for many.

I’ve used Basecamp for many years as a freelancer, and with companies I have worked for to great effect. Certain key features made it an excellent collaboration tool for managing projects, particularly the calendar and messaging tools.

This morning we created a new account for Basecamp Projects (as it is known after July 30th), which no longer setsup a Basecamp:Classic, what we’ve known to love over the years. Here are my gripes with it. Continue reading →

Cookie law needs to go to the browser

In May a new law will be introduced in the European Union requiring websites to provide an opt-in policy for the use of cookies. This poses serious concerns over a number of areas of our experience on the web potentially making every site a negative opt-in experience.

There a already a number of concepts on how to get acceptance for your site to use cookies most of which are offensive to they eye with a few putting up quite extreme brick walls before you can continue to your destination. A good example may be bt.com, by ignoring an acceptance you effectively accept the use of cookies and the site will function as it always has. This is not keeping true to the requirements essentially making it an opt-out experience, one which I think most would prefer, but visually it does something quite engaging.

The law itself has been poorly written, overly complicated and doesn’t seem to have any solid reason or foundation for its existence.

Recently, articles have started to appear with guidance on what you should be doing in preparation. On the whole this has involved audits of what you’re using cookies for, writing them up in plain English for people to understand and updating your terms and privacy policies with the relevant information.

Why should we?

The idea of every site now having to provide some form of opt-in mechanism to work is lunacy. There are exceptions to the rule mainly sites using cookies for transactional purposes but it has yet to be clarified whether this will include tracking cookies.

There is a far simpler solution and in part it already exists.
To this day browser vendors still place options in the browser to disable javascript. Why not do the same for cookies?

There are billions of web pages and only a small number of browsers. To expect millions of people to fall in line with a law when it can be globally resolved by asking the assistance of the browser vendors would seem a logical solution.

The other glaring question is how to ask an international community to comply with a regionalised law. Virgin have started to do this with their blog, which is in its own right an eye soor.

I cannot see that little blog based out in Australia updating to meet these rules. What happens then? Will we have an EU firewall, shutting off sites that don’t comply?

Design That Does Not Serve People Does Not Serve Business

At some point in time we all had tails. After we came down from the trees and began walking upright we realised they were no longer required for balance. But the tail didn’t simply disappear; it became overshadowed by other body parts becoming more functional and was reduced to an insignificant nubbin.

In this post, I want to look at the realities of product evolution reflecting on some of the ideas and thoughts raised during this years DIBI conference. Continue reading →