Agencies' Big Problem: Smarter Clients

Now that I’ve been in an in-house role at Financial Engines for a little while after many years of consulting, I’ve had a chance to reflect a bit on the changing needs that corporate clients have of the design and innovation agencies they work with. (For the sake of expediency I’ll sidestep the emotions around consultancy vs agency vs firm vs studio and just use agency as a generic term). A significant shift has taken place which many agencies have not yet fully realized or capitalized upon, or recognized the threat it poses if they resist it.

It boils down to this: agencies’ clients are smarter, better, more sophisticated than they used to be, even compared to just a few years ago. It used to be that capabilities like ethnographic research, insight and framework generation, analysis of competitive and analogous products/services/experiences, customer journey mapping, persona creation, rapid ideation and prototyping, and the other stalwarts of agency work, were fairly exotic to most clients. Or if they weren’t exotic, they were at least not given enough time and attention. That’s not the case today.

The main question for clients today is: Can an agency significantly move the state of the art forward for our organization? This is much, much harder to achieve than in the past, and I don’t think agencies have quite adapted to this new reality.

There are several trends at work here: 

Expertise Parity

The methods of design, customer research and innovation have become widespread and largely accepted. Through books, the web, magazines, conferences, seminars, and old-fashioned people movement (myself and almost everyone I know who’s left a consultancy recently has gone to an in-house role), agencies no longer have a lock on the cutting edge of knowledge and methods.

Ideas are No Longer the Coin of the Realm

What I found over the last ten years was that clients had less and less need for more ideas or more insights into customers. If anything, they were over-run with these already and therefore lacked focus and quality. But ideas and insights are exactly the things that agencies have historically promised and built their staffing and practices around. There is an implication, spoken or unspoken, that by working with an agency a silver-bullet idea or customer insight will emerge that will be a total game-changer. That used to be quite easy to achieve, but it only rarely happens today, simply because the bar is so much higher and the client has so many ideas in play already.

Instead what many companies want are ways to prioritize, filter and roadmap product/service concepts, identify rationales for action, frameworks for making sense of the world, and then internal awareness and alignment around those. They need better glue, not more things for the glue to hold together. Today, know-why is more important than know-how.

Getting Things Done

This gets to the issue of seeing things through to market. Especially when dealing with holistic user experience design, it requires a great deal of organizational wrangling and collaboration to bring end-to-end customer journeys and multi-device/channel experiences out to the world. There are so many moving parts and so many things that can go awry from initial concept to delivered experience that it’s impossible for someone on the outside to effectively and cost-efficiently manage it.

I think this is a big part of why myself and so many other people I know have gone in-house: the problems that need to be solved to do great user experience and design work now need to be tackled from the inside.

Additionally, corporate organizations have become more collaborative and less hierarchical (though not as flat as small start-ups or agencies themselves), and this means that more people on the client side need to be involved throughout a project. This puts a major dent in the usual agency fat-free timeline, resourcing allocation, and therefore cost structure.

Many agencies are already providing this level of expertise and service, but only for their largest, highest-billing top-tier clients that get their best staff and the most hands-on relationships. But clients of all sizes and types are going to be seeking this level of quality and engagement. Can agencies scale to meet the challenge?

Leuchtturm 1917 Notebooks

Even though I’m a heavy Evernote user, I still like writing things down by hand, especially in meetings, where I find it’s less distracting. Financial Engines, where I work, has a culture where most “notebooks” brought to meetings are made of paper, not plastic and circuit boards, which actually helps meeting productivity immensely.

I’m promiscuous when it comes to notebooks — I’ve rarely bought the same one twice, always searching for the next best thing. Moleskine’s are alright, but I find their paper quality not that great, and I just like to be different. Now I think I have found a notebook I can stick with for a while: the Leuchtturm 1917 Medium. (Don’t ask me how to pronounce it…)

I bought my first one about six months ago, and just purchased my second one now that the first is almost finished (both bought from European Paper, one of the few companies in the US that stocks them).

Mine are both white, which is a refreshing change from the standard black (and looks great with my white HTC One X, and my silver MacBook Air!), plus it’s easier to see in a bag. It has the standard expandable pocket in the back, elastic strap to keep it closed, and bookmarking ribbon (also color coordinated). These have all held up well.

I find the light color, spacing and thin weight of the page rules exactly right. There’s very little show-through from the opposite side of a page, no ink bleed through (at least with what I use it for), and the paper is a nice cream color (I don’t like the more sterile blue/purple tint of Rhodia, for example). The book folds completely flat with no problem, and the spine is still in great shape. The pages are numbered (unlike a Moleskine) if that matters to you, and there is a page at the front to create a table of contents to reference specific page numbers. The 1917 also comes in dot pattern and blank pages.

The cover has just the right pliability/rigidity balance, and has rounded corners to avoid damage. The front is completely blank, and the back has a discrete embossed logo. Included with the notebook are several goodies, including colored stickers to label pages or sections.

I prefer to keep a pen bound to my notebooks, something I always have been frustrated with Moleskines. Leuchtturm sells a nice elastic loop that adhesive attaches to the inside cover. You could use this on any notebook of course.

It’s not worlds different than a Moleskine (there are other notebooks out there that really try to be iconoclastic), but I would put it like this: Moleskine is VW, Leuchtturm is Audi. Pretty similar, both good and solid, Leuchtturm just has more polish.

I definitely give this my stamp of approval, but you can find much more in-depth reviews with a quick Google search.

Why Apple is the Master Craftsman

Whatever you may think about Apple there is no denying that they continue to set new standards for craft. Craft? Yes, that seemingly old-fashioned word that many confine to quilting, scrap-booking and other pursuits often disparagingly categorized as women’s activities. My alma mater, the California College of the Arts, dropped the word craft from its name years ago, feeling that it was dragging the image of the school down. But craft as a concept has made something of a comeback in recent years, and no-one in the mass-production realm is doing it better than Apple.

That’s no accident. It’s the result of enormous amounts of hard work and financial investment, much more than most companies are willing to stomach. Apple’s head of design, Jonathon Ive, said in a recent rare interview with design site Core 77 about the iPhone 4:

“A big part of the experience of a physical object has to do with the materials. [At Apple] we experiment with and explore materials, processing them, learning about the inherent properties of the material—and the process of transforming it from raw material to finished product; for example, understanding exactly how the processes of machining it or grinding it affect it. That understanding, that preoccupation with the materials and processes, is [very] essential to the way we work.”

High quality craft comes about from an interplay between a material and a person, whether they be a woodworker, metal-smith, designer, engineer, or production-line worker. Good craft comes from intimate familiarity and ongoing hands-on manipulation of the material and the forms it can make, not from abstractly visualizing the form as is often done through CAD renderings. They can be highly photorealistic, but often not usefully informative to the design process as they lack tangibility. Ive goes on to say:

“The best design explicitly acknowledges that you cannot disconnect the form from the material—the material informs the form. It is the polar opposite of working virtually in CAD to create an arbitrary form that you then render as a particular material, annotating a part and saying ‘that’s wood’ and so on. Because when an object’s materials, the materials’ processes and the form are all perfectly aligned, that object has a very real resonance on lots of levels. People recognize that object as authentic and real in a very particular way.”

Forty years ago, design philosopher and master wood craftsman David Pye argued that design is always limited by budget, not technique. The ideal form promised by superior technique, he said, will always lose out to affordability, and therefore design will always be compromised. What is remarkable about Apple is that they have navigated around this paradox to a large extent. Obviously they don’t make the cheapest computers around, but they have brought a incredibly high level of quality to everyday products at prices that many people can afford and an increasing number are happy to pay. It used to be that you had to pay tens of thousands of dollars for an object with this degree of precision, whether it was jewelry, a car, or a fine watch.

Apple has done it by taking techniques and materials that everyone else uses for small-batch prototyping, and scaled them up to be mass-production ready, such as how it carves out aluminum blocks to create the shells for everything from iPod Nanos to MacBook Pros to the new Mac Mini. They work closely and over the long term with a small set of suppliers to hone the techniques and get the costs out, rather than doing what everyone else does which is to shop around every year to different vendors, always hunting for the lowest price. Apple isn’t afraid to “single source” a technique, technology or material from a vendor if it gives the right affect and advantage, while other companies avoid like the plague being locked into single vendors.

And of course Apple has famously fanatical attention to every detail that starts at the very top with Steve Jobs, and percolates out to the rest of the company. Apple is certainly not unique if you look across all companies in all industries, but very few - if any - of their direct competitors have it.

So it’s not magical how Apple does what it does with the quality of its products. It’s just that most other companies don’t have the patience, budget allocations, or sheer will to pull it off.

The Five Levels of Sketching

My sketching skills have gone to heck as I don’t do it enough anymore, but I appreciate people who really do it well and fluidly. This article nicely categorizes different types of sketches, each of which have their own purpose.

SJSU Industrial Design Final Show

San Jose State’s industrial design department is having its final show on Monday, May 18. If you’re in the area, check it out! It’s being held in the rotunda at San Jose City Hall, from 6 to 9:30pm.

Find out more >