Seriously, get some user experience
Daniele Fiandaca’s opinion piece (NMA 04 Feb) raised the question of whether digital agencies were focussed on aesthetics at the expense of user experience. I am delighted to see this issue being discussed because over recent years user experience (UX) has become “un-sexy” and the column inches that were dedicated to the subject back in the early 2000’s when it was new and exciting are all but forgotten.
What I find most interesting is Daniele’s solution, concluding that most agencies are getting it “very right” (a statement I, along with millions of web users would probably take issue with) but that until they have dedicated user experience specialists they will continue to get the balance wrong.
We hire plenty of UX professionals who join us from agencies frustrated at their low level of involvement in client engagements and the relative contempt with which their skills are considered. We routinely hear that UX was the first thing to be cut when customer budget’s got tight and if you are reading this and disbelieving of it, the evidence is all around us that user experience is still not taken seriously. We have only to think of the interactions we have had online in the past week to find a comical illustration of a poorly designed user journey or a disconnect between experience and design.
This issue will not be solved by agencies building dedicated UX teams nor will it from customer experience consultancies bleating on about the need for their skills. It will be solved by clients taking their customers seriously, recognising the opportunity to differentiate that a well designed customer experience will offer them and then demanding that budget is allocated and work completed.
10 years ago a brand could be forgiven for not specifying that the website they have just commissioned must also be usable – it was not an unreasonable assumption that if you asked for a registration process people would actually be able to register using it. The truth, as we all found out, was that unless it was considered it didn’t happen. But 10 years on the subject has lost its sex appeal because everyone is doing it right? Wrong.