The Importance Of Roles

Posted by: vlad, Filed under: Opinions & CommentsMay 13th, 2012

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Any successful digital project (or project in general) brings together various people with individual functions in order to achieve a set goal. If everyone is clear on what they are meant to add to the project we ensure the best use of resources – things get done faster and to a higher level of quality. If people are unclear on what each other is meant to do we overlap work, frustrate each other and spend more time discussing what we’re meant to do rather than actually doing it. In this blog post I’ll explore the importance of early role definitions in project work and make some suggestions on client/agency roles.

This post forms part of our series exploring the tools that make up Client Centric Design. For more information Paul Boag, creator of the term Client Centric Web-Design dedicates a book chapter and podcast on the topic that I’d highly recommend.

TL;DR

Early role definition of all project stakeholders ensures each individual focusses on their skill set. This ensures maximum utilisation of resources – better work, done faster and with less stress.

Language Barrier

I hope you’d agree with me when I say that people with different skill sets look at the world differently from each other. A Marketing Director and a Developer don’t look at a new company website and ask themselves the same set of questions if they heard each other talking about what’s important and unimportant you’d expect them to have very different views. This is true even for people within the same organisation (Marketing Director vs Head of IT, Account Director vs Designer).

Here’s an example that’s pretty common and something I’ve been guilty of:

• Agency, "This is what users want, it says it in the research"
• Client, "That doesn’t work with what we’re trying to do as a business"
• Agency, "You’re users are your business!"

Here’s another example that I’ve been on one side of more than I can count:

• Client, "We’ve got a brief for an iPhone app"
• Agency, "Why?"
• Client, "Competitor x has one"

We’re all guilty of overstepping our areas of expertise in order to do (what we think) is a good job. In the first example the agency is presuming to know the client’s business better than the client. In the second example the client is foregoing stating the business issue that needs to be solved and coming up with a digital solution. In each case the guilty party is trying to speak the other person’s language thereby causing inefficiencies and flat out mistakes.

I Know What My Job Is

Of course we all do. We’re professionals, we’ve been working in the industry and in our roles for many years. In my experience people don’t mean to overstep their roles however they do so in the belief that they are helping the process. It’s far easier to tell the designer to change the colour to yellow rather than saying, "we’ve found that blue doesn’t resonate with our users". The issue is, we’ve started to speak another language, we have no idea the impact our guess at the colour yellow makes to the rest of the design. We are now in a position where the design doesn’t work and we’re unwilling to change the colour we suggested.

You only need to step over your role barriers a few times in a project to throw it off kilter. The result is work that doesn’t meet the team’s potential delivered later and with more frustration. I’m sure I’m not the only one who wants to avoid this at all costs.

Client/Agency Roles

So with all that talk of roles lets throw out some core elements to the client/agency roles.

Client Role

• Domain expert: the client knows their business and customers better than the agency
• Problems: the client is therefore responsible for articulating the problem sets around the business and customer
• Approval/feedback: armed with their understanding of the business/customer and focus on solving a specific problem set the client can then approve or give feedback on suggested solutions by rationalising whether the solution does or does not solve the business/customer problem

Agency Role

• Communication expert: the agency knows their communication speciality better than the client
• Solutions: the agency is responsible for crafting solutions the business/customer problem
• Presentation: armed with a solution the agency needs to clearly articulate how the solution solves the particular problem set

Hopefully that outlines a (very) high-level of role definitions. I’ll go through the specifics of each stage of the Client Centric Design process as we introduce them in upcoming blog posts.

Role Agreement

I honestly don’t think this needs to be overly complicated. If you’ve spent more than thirty minutes going over the core points in an agreed role agreement I think you’re making it too complicated. What’s important is that the roles are clear and defined from the outset.

Breaking The Contract

Are people still going to break the rules? Of course they are, we’re human after all. What’s important here is that we deal with that inevitability as adults when it happens. If a reasonable discussion about someone overstepping their agreed role turns into petty "he said", "she said" you’ve honestly got a bigger issue on your hands that’s outside the scope of this blog post.

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Client Centric Design

Posted by: vlad, Filed under: Opinions & CommentsMay 6th, 2012

Our job is to deliver the highest quality digital communication and business products possible to our clients. To do this it’s important that we constantly review and refine the tools and processes we use to ensure the best output. I believe the approach outlined in this blog is a serious step in the right direction.

Concept Origins

The concept behind Client Centric Design comes from the well prominent British web designer Paul Boag. The thesis behind the approach is that a closer collaboration between client and agency results in better work. If you’re interested in digging deeper into Boag’s thinking I’d really recommend checking out the book or the podcast on the topic.

Back In My Day…

Web developers will often see their client as a roadblock to their ability to develop a ‘cool’ site that delivers the best solution the to site’s users. Though we believe in bleeding edge technologies, modern design practices and delivering optimal user experiences, our primary objective is to solve a business problem. This objective drives all others, if it didn’t we’d have nice looking sites/campaigns with happy users and no business value, not what people pay for.

Breaking Down The Language Barrier

Ultimately the biggest advantage from a collaborative approach is that it breaks down the language barriers between the various disparate stakeholders involved in digital strategy delivery process. One statement can be interpreted completely differently depending on if you’re a client, suit, creative, developer, user, project manager etc etc. The better we manage these language barriers the more aligned everyone is, the better the thinking.

Architecting Better Solutions

As a philosophy this simply makes sense. In our experience, the more agencies and clients collaborate the bigger benefits to both parties. Work is produced faster because there’s far less back-and-forth. The concepts are far better as they’re more closely aligned to the organisation. Conceptual boundaries are often pushed with more ease as there’s mutual understanding of the concept and how it delivers back to the business.

The CCD Toolkit

I’d like CCD to be more than simply a philosophy (though it’s a great one). In order to make it a concrete process with a definite outcome I feel it works best as a toolkit. If we pull together the latest in strategic and digital processes and apply the CCD approach we get an incredibly powerful toolkit which results in strategies and concepts rooted in customer and business insights.

Some of the following tools may be familiar to you, some may not be. Some have come from Boag’s book others are processes I’ve been using to collaborate with clients in past projects. Together they make up what I feel would make for the ideal CCD process. I’ll go through each of these individually in separate blog posts but broadly the tools/processes are:

• Role allocation: View Post
• Initial workshop
• One-to-one interviews
• Inspiration board
• User personas
• Style tiles
• Brand personality
• Wiregames
• Guidelines
• Prototype testing
• Minimal Viable Product creation
• Test, learn, revise, optimise

If you’re interested in our approach or have any comments please get in touch!

Let Requirements Trap You or Liberate You

Posted by: vlad, Filed under: Opinions & CommentsApril 29th, 2012

The suits want approval from their client, the client wants approval from their management, the creatives want an award, the tech team want more time or less features, the customer wants better customer support and less ads. We live and work in an industry that has conflicting requirements. Sometimes these conflicting requirements lead to people’s frustration however I’m going to argue that they can be the fuel that lead to innovation . This blog post looks at how the architecture firm BIG leverages constraints in order to design some of the most ground-breaking buildings in modern history and how we should take these learnings to produce better work for our clients, ourselves and everyone around us.
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What is Digital Strategy

Posted by: vlad, Filed under: Opinions & CommentsApril 22nd, 2012

Since I’m the new Digital Strategist at Mass Media I thought it would be a worthwhile to solidify my thoughts on what digital strategy is, how it should be approached and how it helps our clients with their digital activity. I’d love this to be a conversation so if you agree, disagree, have questions, whatever hit me up!
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Lytro Camera – the future of image capture has arrived

Posted by: admin, Filed under: Art & Creative, Industry Trends, Opinions & Comments, TechnologyMarch 27th, 2012

This is going to change the way we see captured images.

Full light field capture which offers variable focal length images capturing the entire depth of field in a shot so you can play with it later is pretty amazing. While this is still pretty simplistic in the Lytro, the possibility of the underlying tech are very exciting.

Imagine shooting Google Street View again using this, trying to capture every street in the world with variable focus so you can look at what you like. Take that a step further to when this matures and you can shoot your holiday video capturing full light filed and go back over the footage to review things you missed. Add to that professional production, global mapping and location based information overlays and we are starting approaching virtual tourism pretty rapidly.

If this was viewable through a head mounted display or virtual goggles so you got full immersion and coupled with eye tracked focussing we would be able to have a pretty good virtualised experience of another place or event. I can image bopping out to a full immersion replay of the latest Glastonbury festival in surround sound, full immersion 3D or exploring a mining collapse after sending in a bot with recording gear.

To come back to the now for a moment, check out the science of the camera and some example pics on the website here http://www.lytro.com/

Hi-DPI Screens and what it means for designers

Posted by: Stefan, Filed under: Industry TrendsMarch 23rd, 2012

Apple call it a Retina Display, everyone else calls it Hi-DPI, whatever you want to call it, pick up an iPhone, or the new iPad and you’ll see what we’re talking about. Truly breathtaking graphic quality with no distinguishable pixels. Android tablets and phones also sometimes feature these Hi-DPI screens, but that really depends on the price you pay for your device. Either way, Hi-DPI screens are here to stay and 2012 will be the year that we see them go mainstream.

Its fully anticipated, that the new MacBook Air due for release in the next few months will be the first Apple laptop to feature a Hi-DPI Retina Screen, but for those naysayers who thought it was going to be a mobile-only thing, or ‘just a Mac thing’, there is news for you.

Microsoft have announced that Windows 8 will fully support Hi-DPI screens this year, news which has probably sent the developer world in to somewhat chaos. Over the past few months I’ve spent many many hours upscaling designs from the iPhone 3G to iPhone 4, and more recently iPad 2 designs up to the new iPad resolution, so I am well aware just how much EXTRA work is involved.

For starters, unless you have a HUGE monitor, designing for the iPad’s 2048 x 1536 is extremely cumbersome. Even with Apple’s huge 27″ iMac, there are not enough pixels to view your iPad designs 1:1.

In the past I’ve used apps like X-Scope to mirror my Photoshop screen on my iPhone or iPad to allow me to (in realtime) view my design work on the device and make sure it’s a tight and useable design. However this app relies on you viewing the artwork on your Mac at 100% too, something which is not currently possibly for the new iPad.

With the advent of HiDPI desktop machines on the horizon, we are all in for a rough ride when it comes to making things look pretty online.

So where does that leave us designers? For now, not in a great place.

Production Time

Much to the dislike of every digital producer around the world, design time is going to get LONGER for more than one reason. Firstly, unless your boss is willing to invest in a new HiDPI screen for you (which are likely to be very expensive) then you are going to be stuck designing on a ‘standard’ monitor, which is not big enough for HiDPI, so yes, its going to be like the good old days when you had to scroll around the screen to see your work, and we all know that if you can’t see the entire canvas at 1:1 size, things slow down and the overall design suffers. Fact.

Secondly, now instead of saving just one image, coders will have to save down two files, code the two variations in resolution in to the HTML and also upload two different files to the servers.

The most important fact of all is clarity. When you have a screen that is so clear it’s like the printed page, trust me when I say you’re clients will notice EVERY imperfection or mistake in the HTML. Coding errors that you may get away with today, will stand out like a sore thumb next year, HiDPI screens bring a whole new meaning to the words ‘pixel perfect’. To prevent this, both designers and coders are going to need to spend more time making sure everything is crystal clear and spot on design wise. ’1 pixel out’ today, will be ’2 pixels out’ on HiDPI, and that is noticeable!

Quality of images

If you refuse to design websites with HiDPI screens in mind you will be left with all your images (yes ALL your images, icons etc) appearing at what is effectively half resolution, or in layman’s terms… BLURRY. There are already forums after forums discussing this issue already so we won’t talk about it here, but needless to say, the only website that looks half decent on a HiDPI screen at the moment is Apple’s own site, which is now 4x as heavy by the way so expect your mobile data plan to be used up much faster on your iPad/iPhone.

Cost

Do you regularly buy shots from iStockphoto or the like? Well you’d better buy more credits, because you’ll need to be buying images at a much higher resolution so that they look great on new HiDPI screens.

New HiDPI screens won’t be cheap, although it is expected that Apple won’t raise the price of their current range of models. Historically they never have raised the price of their products, they just make them better, so here’s to hoping they do the same with the new Mac’s. Other brands, well, they may well slap a premium on the price of the new screens just because they can. We’ll have to wait and see.

Conclusion

Well, as a designer, I’ve been dreading this day since the iPhone 4 came out. I knew that was the tip of the iceberg, and consumers would demand retina display quality throughout all their devices. As predicted, we are now in a moment in technology where lack of immediate adoption will result in us having to do twice as much work to cater for high end and low end users.

Whilst inevitable, and exciting. It’s also very annoying.

Read more about Microsoft’s take on this on their blog