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.

Feedback

I love the stuff, give me some: Agree? Disagree? War stories? Whatever!

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!

TL;DR

We can achieve more creativity and performance out of every project if we are enabled by constraints rather than shackled by them.

Yes Is More

This is the title of the graphic design novel that introduced me to Danish architecture firm BIG. “Yes Is More” is also the philosophy BIG uses when faced with the social, resource, political, client, creative and environmental requirements placed on everyone of their projects.

Rather than using the conflicting constraints as an excuse why a project didn’t meet all expectations, BIG leverages them to come up with groundbreaking designs from both a conceptual and functional point of view. In the video below the head of BIG, Bjarke Ingels shares some of his philosophies on architecture and dealing with the pressures of conflicting constraints.

One Of My Favourite Examples

When asked to design a parking lot and apartment building, rather than creating two separate buildings, BIG blended the two together to keep the parking as close to the street as possible while giving everyone in the apartments a great view. All the apartments not only have a view but sun-facing roof gardens. There are more plants in this world thanks to this building. Aptly named, the “MTN Mountain Dwellings” acts like a mountain, allowing water to flow freely from the top to bottom to water the roof gardens. See if you can spot the parking lot in the picture below.

Not only did BIG leverage the given constraints, they added more to really challenge themselves!

Wisdom Of The Crowds

In his book, The Wisdom of Crowds James Surowiecki discuses the benefits of forming and comparing solutions as a collective over doing it individually. You are much more likely to uncover potential issues or identify new opportunities around a problem or solution by having many people with varied backgrounds and opinions looking at the same problem or solution.

I think that what BIG does phenomenally well is take the wisdom of the crowd into consideration. They take the collective knowledge of the parties that place constraints on them, they say, “these constraints exist for a reason” and then they approach the overall concept with a 30,000 foot view.

Design By Committee

“Yes Is More” and the “Wisdom of Crowds” are both in complete contrast to designing by committee. The superfluous meetings and inane complexity that comes from designing by committee comes down to a lot of individuals who are frankly out of their depth and hide it by “being involved” and “having an opinion”. This concept is elegantly put by the Peter Principal, “in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to level of incompetence”. I’d add to that, “and then joins a committee”.

Tug-of-war or Flowing Stream?

The difference comes down to vision and focus. BIG uses constraints to drive their vision forward. The crowd comes together towards a solution. Whereas the committee is made up of individuals with personal agendas… their focus is on themselves rather than the project and that makes all the difference in the world.

If, like the stream you use constraints to contour while you still move forward towards a goal – good. If you’re fighting against everyone to get YOUR ideas through at the cost of everyone else – bad.

Applying This To Agencies

There’s a lot I think we ad folks and all creative industries can learn from BIG. There are a lot of smart, creative people in every ad agency, if we put our minds to how we can leverage constraints rather than be bogged down by them we can be more like BIG and less like Dilbert.

Image credit

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!

TL;DR

Digital strategy gives us a framework for activity. More important than the initial strategy is how you structure ongoing activity to continually learn, revise and optimise the various facets of your digital presence.

42*

At the broadest level strategy is the answer to a question, “how can I most effectively allocate my resources to get the maximum business return?” The breadth of insights, tools, technologies, devices, channels and customer segments available for us to choose from make answering this question more daunting every day.

What’s Changed

Up until the last 10 – 15 years a marketing plan was relatively straight-forward. You bought as many eye-balls as you could, uncovered a compelling insight (sometimes) about your “consumers” and then produced a creative marvel (sometimes) that “cut through the clutter”.

The fragmented media landscape, ease of communication scale and sense of customer empowerment mean that the most successful modern communications have surpassed their analogue one-way predecessors and:

• Built business strategies based on customer decisions
• Created new markets through community building and product innovation
• Re-invented customer support while galvanising staff and customers
• Re-built our cities into interactive playgrounds of discovery

The possibilities to re-invent, revolutionise and create actual value are now infinite – it’s more important now than ever to have a framework, a strategy, to structure how you navigate through endless choices whilst getting the most out of your activity.

Reaching an Answer

Unlike the bulls-eye creative campaigns of yesteryear, a digital strategy won’t give you the final ‘answer’, nor should it. Digital is immediate and fluid, unlike previous mediums it gives us realtime feedback on how customers are interacting with us.

The answer to ground-breaking digital is to continuously test, learn, revise, optimise and learn:

• Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg quote: “move fast and break things”
• Zynga (Farmville, Cityville etc… just IPO’d at $7 bn) founder Mark Pincus on testing being his most important business lesson
• Twitter was an audio-blog until they figured audio-blogging wasn’t really going anywhere
• Groupon was The Point, a site to help you campaign until they discovered they could merge crowd-sourcing and coupons into one giant mess of commercialism

These companies, all digital juggernauts, all accept one thing, they don’t have all the answers. They compensate this fact by constantly refining their products to better serve their customers while staying true to their core strategies (most of the time). If we want to build successful digital properties we would be well advised to take a leaf out of their books (e-readers?) and follow suit. The lesson learned is more important than the work produced, it helps test our thinking and helps move us towards a better set of solutions.

Onion Anyone?

A strategy should never be static. It should never be a 300 page powerpoint deck that sits in a drawer and is never read. It should be a framework that is flexible, organic and evolves over time – just like natural selection. I find the best way to constantly think about the strategic framework is by breaking up thinking in three layers. A strategic onion if you will.

Primary: The first layer focuses on optimising your activity. What are we doing? How do we do it better. It is analytics heavy and uses A/B and multivalent testing to continually refine and optimise.

Secondary: The second layer looks at identifying successful activity and introducing them into new untested channels. We’ve got a great booking engine, let’s build an application for it that can live on other sites. Out blog is successful, let’s extend our community into a new channel. Our sales process rocks, let’s optimise it and reduce resource outlay.

Tertiary: The final layer (my personal favourite) looks at broader trends and our place in the market. What could potentially threaten our position in the market? What broader opportunities are there for us? Are we in danger of loosing relevance? How can we innovate? This layer looks to stare the Innovator’s Dilemma square in the face and overcome it.

Throughout the strategic process the most important factor is… our client! I think it’s impossible to create a powerful digital strategy without close collaboration with the business owner and expert. More on that in another post

Image credit
* If you didn’t get the reference

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/

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

Well, two main things really…

• 4G connectivity
• Retina Display running at 2048 x 1536

So how much better is it?

Well, not a great deal.

4G Connectivity and the iPad

The 4G does not work in Australia, regardless of what the folks at the shop will tell you, the iPad will NOT run on the 4G network in Australia, and it won’t for a long time. The correct frequencies will not come available until 2015 in Australia, let’s be honest, by then you won’t have this year’s iPad.

So how does it perform? Well, it runs on Dual Channel 3G, so in layman’s terms that means ‘a bit faster’ than your current 3G connection, and much slower than an Android 4G tablet (which does happen to run on Australia’s 4G network).

As you can see from this image, the speeds are erratic at best, and not a great deal faster than the iPhone 4S, which consistently downloads data at around 5 or 6mb on the Telstra network.

If you need speed, you are better off getting the WiFi iPad, and using a Telstra 4G dongle thing. Cumbersome, but 3 or 4 times faster.

Retina Display

Well, for me the novelty of the Retina Display has worn off now, most new Android Phones run at ultra high resolutions making dots invisible, so this isn’t an amazing thing, although on a screen this large, it is quite a big deal. Images look crisp, text is super sharp and overall its far easier on your eyes. The pixel density is not quite has high as the iPhone, and as a result, if you look closely you can actually see the dots, contrary to the story Apple will tell you. Despite that, it’s still the best screen I’ve ever seen in my life, and I am eager for my Mac to now ‘go Retina’.

Browsing issues

Something no one has spoken about yet, but as a creative agency, is a big deal is website design for the new iPad.

Unless you have custom coded your website (read, Apple.com only at this stage), your website will look FAR WORSE on the new iPad.

Why? Well… your text will look ridiculously crisp, yet your existing images will appear non-retina (because they are just ‘normal’ images saved for standard web specs) which means that your eye perceives all images as blurry because they are displaying at half resolution. Usually this is not a problem because on your Mac, PC or old iPad, the pixels are the same density for both text or image, however with the new iPad, images are rendered at the ‘old’ pixel density, which when put next to text at the new retina density, quite frankly look terrible.

So what’s the solution, well we’ve found there are some code snippets that will check for retina display and stream double size images to the new retina display device, however think about this… Retina Display images are 4 times, yes FOUR TIMES more pixels than standard screen images, in real terms that means FAR bigger images, and with such a crisp screen you will want to make sure you compress your images far less to avoid JPEG artefacts which again means even bigger images.

In the real world that means a ‘nice’ quality full screen background image of medium complexity, could easily be over 1Mb, add to the mix a few transparent PNG’s for sprites or graphics and your website could really start to slow down on load, especially over a 3G/4G network. Later this year it is predicted that Apple will roll out the retina display to their line of Macs which means this dilemma is here to stay until we have a much faster internet and ALL users are on new retina screens, both Mac and PC users.

The beautiful retina display has created a new nightmare for web designers and coders. Just as we approach a time where we are rid of the ‘design 2 versions for IE and Firefox’, we are now faced with a new dilemma: saving images at two different sizes for regular screens and iPads. The scale of this problem is directly related to the number of images on your site, if you have a text only website you are safe, if you have a blog with thousands of images, well… you are screwed.

My prediction is that Apple will release a new version of Safari that checks the server for a double size version and automatically swaps out the low resolution image with the high resolution image, but thats purely speculation.

Until then, we are left having to manually code HTML to do the swapping process for us. In the process you can expect your new retina display website to take realistically 4 to 10 times longer to load on the new iPad because your images will need to be that much bigger to cater for the new screen.

If you have the new iPad and want to see an example of this, visit apple.com, you can see incredibly crisp text and blurry images, then wait about 10 to 20 seconds and slowly you will see the high resolution images swap in one by one.

Thanks Apple, you are now officially a web designers nightmare!

No matter what website you are on, the standard priority of ‘shares’ generally goes like this:

1. Likes
2. Tweets
3. LinkedIn
4. The rest

Facebook’s open-graph technology has made it really simple for anyone to add a ‘like’ button to their website and as a result, everyone seems to ‘like’ stuff these days… Until this morning, when I started to notice something rather strange.

Pin it buttons had a higher number of ‘pins’ than Facebook, not just on one article, or one site, but on a number of sites.

Now I’m not saying there is a global shift towards Pinning, however the relatively new Pinterest has overshot Twitter and LinkedIn as a means of sharing content online.

Should Facebook be worried? We think Yes.

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

In a slightly ironic move, Facebook today officially launched their Facebook Messenger for Windows app. A decade has passed since the likes of ICQ and MSN Messenger ruled the world of internet communications, then along came sites like Bebo, MySpace and Facebook which caused a massive shift in how people ‘quickly’ communicate. Now it looks like Facebook want us to go old school again with their new Messenger app (which is also due for release on OS X too). It’s a confusing move for Facebook, the app doesn’t have any ads (yet!), so basically, its MSN Messenger, but with your Facebook friends, so that’s just Adium or Trellian then… with a Facebook badge.

Try it out by downloading it from here