User Experience: The Ride of Your Life

Their bikes are technically unsophisticated and don’t represent good value for money compared to other manufacturers, but when you buy a Harley-Davidson you’re not just buying a bike.

It’s bearing this in mind that I’ve been giving serious consideration to what we do at Marque. Our digital offering comprises six developers in our New York and Glasgow studios augmented by specialist subcontractors and the designers throughout the rest of our company. Effectively we’re a small digital agency working within a larger cross discipline branding consultancy. As with most digital agencies we sell time and as most of my team are developers we make profit by charging clients by multiplying the number of days we estimate it will take to make something by our daily rate.

But times they are a changing. A few months ago we hired Cameron, a phenomenally talented Rails developer when I realised that some of our PHP projects would suit Rails better. It turns out that for certain projects Cameron can achieve in one week, what one of our PHP developers takes two weeks to achieve.

As technologies improve, our efficiency as developers will also improve, allowing us to do the grunt work faster. This has significant implications if our business model is to charge for the days it takes to make stuff.

The maturing of the open source movement is another factor to consider. We recently created an online game for the Edinburgh International Fringe Festival, which came with the old duo of tight budget and open brief.

We discovered Box2D – a physics engine that an enthusiastic ActionScript programmer had ported from the C++ code that one of the World of Warcraft programmers had made open source and posted on SourceForge. Building on top of Box2D allowed us to create a highly polished experience that one year ago I would have said was unfeasible within the budget.

I’m not suggesting that we will be getting rid of our developers any time soon, but if we don’t allow them to evolve, our businesses will suffer. As advances in technology commoditise our offering our developers must move up the food chain, moving us into new markets.

A couple of years ago our digital team made websites and the occasional screen saver, but now we spend most of our time developing applications.

Last year we built a complex, robust desktop application that’s now been used to sell about $2 billion of property. Its importance isn’t so much that it was built in three months by a team of web developers, but that we are now selling products as opposed to the time required to make products – allowing the cost of the product to be positioned in direct relation to its value to the user.

Getting Better

We are getting better at making better stuff for our clients and if we don’t evolve our business model as well we are screwed.

The conclusion I’ve come to is that the stuff we do in order to win the work – the stuff we tend to give away for free – is exactly where we offer the most value, and is where we have the most opportunity to grow.

Our focus is on user experience. Actually, every digital agency that makes good stuff is also focused on user experience, whether they realise it or not.

Alex at Dog Digital tells of a client that spent vast sums on a web-based system their call centre operators use to process enquiries from customers. Alex suggested building a website to give the public access to the system so that instead of waiting on hold they could get the information themselves. A simple way to a better user experience and an increase in efficiency that seems obvious with hindsight.

Companies like Accenture have been sending their consultants into organisations to spot opportunities just like this for years, and you can bet that they charge handsomely for their conclusions. We do similar consultations on our client’s operations but generally it’s done for free or cheap with a view to scoping a tangible project with billable hours.

And here’s the thing, I believe we are often in a better position than management consultants to consider our clients’ operations and the resulting user experiences.

Tom Peters suggests in the book Re-Imagine that we reconsider where we offer value to our customers and any areas of our business where we are not best in class we farm out to someone that is the best.

Extreme

This may sound extreme but consider the experience of others. When Lou Gerstner joined IBM in 1993 as CEO it was a behemoth facing extinction. His CV included spells at American Express and McKinsey & Company where he worked on business operations to deliver better customer experience. And this is exactly what he brought to IBM, with a concentration on IT services with a bias towards the internet, famously introducing the mantra that they should always supply their customers with the best hardware, even if that hardware was not made by IBM – a strategy that explains why your ThinkPad has a Lenovo badge on it and how IBM generated $10.8 billion income from $98.8 billion last year.

The move towards selling User eXperience in digital agencies isn’t anything new. The shift away from separate design, usability and content teams began years ago when most of us didn’t even know what UX stands for. But the focus on UX is not restricted to digital agencies.

Last month I attended UX Week, a conference in San Francisco organised by Adaptive Path, one of the world’s foremost user experience consultancies. Most of the people I met had UX Designer for the job title on their business cards but they came from a diverse group of industries from banking to healthcare and software to car hire.

While I was there I had the good fortune to be asked to speak to Adobe’s Experience Design team. It was exhilarating to find a team of about 90 people dedicated to the user experience of Adobe’s software.

This is a team that is growing in both numbers and stature with an aggressive recruiting policy that attracts the best minds around today – the creators of both Newsmap and the Spectra Visual Newsreader to name but two.

So go on, give your web designers more control over content and usability and reprint their business cards as experience designers. Give your web developers a week or two to play with Adobe Air and reprint their cards as software engineers. Just changing the name of your job should be enough to remind everyone where the value of your offer is.