Blurring the line between clients and agencies
Traditionally there has been an uneasy tension between design agencies and clients. Agency Client Services representatives would conduct awkward meetings with clients to uncover what the business thinks the user needs from their digital product. In an effort to keep the client happy, compromises are sometimes made before the design team have been briefed. Designers would be kept at arm’s length and expected to come up with the “killer concept” on first attempt.
The advent of Agile project management has played a major part in changing the nature of this relationship between clients and designers. Design agencies are becoming more like consultants, being invited to co-locate with client project teams. This may be a relatively new approach for design agencies, however it has long been the way IT and Accounting agencies have worked.
Bringing a UX consultant into the team doesn’t automatically mean the project will user-centric or design-driven. You may end just importing the client/designer friction into your team.
The Agile process may have brought UX Designers into the project team, but projects can still have a tendency to be led by the agendas of IT Business Analysts or Product Owners. The vision of IT BAs may be limited by the tech stack they have to work with. Whilst Product Owners can be more focused on hitting the KPIs of a feature list.
The concept of a UX Business Analyst is still foreign to most projects. Considering the “user story” is at the core of what drives the Agile process from ideation to final user accept testing, it makes sense this should written from the User Experience.
Drawing upon 20 years of experience designing websites and apps, Dale Thornton will reference case studies to illustrate how blurring the line between agencies and clients can benefit both large corporates as well as small start-ups.