Experience Matters

Confessions of an Interaction Designer

When it comes to designing the experience of an end product (be it a web site or a remote control), is it better to work inside the enterprise or outside, in an agency or design consultancy? For interaction designers, both choices have pluses and minuses but both paths start with thinking about the customer.

Customer knowledge is the Holy Grail of what we do: IA, IxD, usability, etc. Typically the first words out of our mouths at the beginning of a project are “So, who are the customers? What do they want?”

It’s a fair assumption that the product or service company itself is the most direct line of access to the customer. But while most companies have some form of help line or customer service department with bank after bank of reps on phones, it’s no guarantee that the company has mined any real knowledge about their customers—or possesses any kind of corporate interest in that knowledge. Rarely have I encountered a corporation that has a tidy, well-organized, up-to-date set of customer information maintained by a dedicated internal team.

On the agency side, while there may not be any direct knowledge about a specific customer type, there is certainly (hopefully) a wealth of knowledge as well as a passionate interest in customer interests and behavior. Still, you may be no closer to the elusive Customer X for whom you’re designing Product Y. Agencies depend on their clients to provide them access to their customers—it’s not always successful. Too often, substitutions of general behaviors for specific behaviors must be made during the design process.

I’ve spent time in both environments—although longer in the agency world—and have dealt with the ups and downs of each.

On the enterprise side, what I struggled with most frequently was how the daily demands of the corporate culture made it nearly impossible to get any kind of UX work done.

For example, the group I worked in at a large healthcare holding company had spent a lot of money on a portable usability testing suite. Consisting of two laptops and Morae software, it was supposed to allow us to go to our testers throughout the building. In reality, the rigid rules around HIPAA and corporate IT security turned the suite into a $15,000 doorstop: the laptops had to be given permission by IT to even be on the network—a process that was by no means speedy. Despite an internal commitment to the group’s existence, there was no practical operational support. An entire two-day usability test had to be scrapped, setting back the entire project indefinitely.

On the agency side, what I have had to deal with all too often is the lack of either time or budget. For a redesign of a consumer products site back in 2002, I asked for three weeks to properly map out a vast and confusing existing site which dated back to 1997. The site included multiple, different versions of the same page, linked to randomly—the client had absolutely no idea what content they even had anymore. We were, admittedly, a small shop but my requested time was cut in half—whether the reason was budget or a wish to get things done fast, it was still a disservice to the client and their customer. Budget is always a struggle and it becomes all too easy for a fiscally minded team member (either agency or client-side) to slash key deliverables (wireframes usually take it on the chin) in order to ‘gain efficiencies’.

The reality is both sides of the fence have the same number of challenges, even if those problems vary in complexity. There are always internal politics to deal with and draconian policies to be overcome. I’ve come to learn that it’s the small victories that count—each one is an important step in connecting the customer to the end product.

For me, though, it’s what an agency offers via a wide range of resources, disciplines and coworkers with varied (and often surprising) backgrounds: every day, I learn new things just by showing up to work. The ability to bounce ideas off a team member or get into a lively debate about how a piece of functionality should work is, for me, invaluable.