The Importance Of Roles

Filed under: Opinions & Commentsposted on May 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

Filed under: Opinions & Commentsposted on May 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

Filed under: Opinions & Commentsposted on April 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.

What is Digital Strategy

Filed under: Opinions & Commentsposted on April 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!

Lytro Camera – the future of image capture has arrived

Filed under: Art & Creative, Industry Trends, Opinions & Comments, Technologyposted on March 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/

Social Media vs the Warlord

Filed under: General Chatter, Opinions & Commentsposted on March 8th, 2012

KONY. It’s the word on everyone’s lips, and their facebook pages as well. It’s the latest social media phenomenon that has exploded over the last few days. The documentary is pretty powerful stuff based on Joseph Kony – a warlord in Uganda responsible for the enslavement of more than 30,000 children and the efforts of Invisible Children (a not-for-profit organisation) trying to harness the power of social media to garner attention and make a change, namely having Kony arrested and brought to justice.

Aside from the subject matter, what is interesting is how social media has been implemented to make the voice of a few the voice of millions in such a short space of time. News programs have jumped on this to try and capitalise on the interest and not matter where you look you can’t escape it. Another predictable side effect is that although social media has been used to great effect to generate this massive amount of exposure, it is the same format that could ultimately be this causes downfall, with many coming out against the campaign and the people behind it – Invisible Children.

And to think that all this has occurred in less then 48 hours, amazing. How long can this message of change be kept front of mind before the next big social media phenomenon hits and takes all the headlines away, oh it’s happening already, the next ipad was just announced.

Check out the site, watch the documentary and make up your own minds.

www.kony2012.com