UX and the missing piece?

There has been a great resurgence of interest in User Experience – UX or UXD, which cannot be a bad thing. I remember the first ripples when this discipline started to take its first faltering steps int the US a good few years ago. It slid off the radar for a while but is now back stronger than ever.

Reading some of the many articles in the media what I an struck by is the unspoken dimension that is so apparent in what people are trying to achieve – it is psychology. Back in the 1950’s when advertising in the US was searching for some underlying scientific principles, it was psychology that they turned to. Like the web today, they were dealing with human behaviour, trying to understand it, evaluate it … and ultimately, predict it.

Many of the techniques employed by UX practitioners will be familiar to any psychologist – what sometimes concerns me is that in general it lacks the theoretical foundations. This restricts the deeper understanding and insight of cognition and behaviour that could lead to the most effective outcomes.

 

Ad hoc, full service, boutique or à la carte?

I am old enough to remember when the advertising industry spawned first, creative hotshops (remember Cramer and Saatchi?), then media independents and it wasn’t long before the discussions began to rage between the comparative value of buying full-service vs ad hoc. Later, when digital media first reared its interactive head it was seen as a separate service. Now, digital has been embraced as part of the marketing and communications scene and the old argument (in a slightly different guise) appears again.

We could spend a lot of time discussing whether ad agencies have sufficient digital expertise or fully recognise the possibilities, or if specialist digital agencies have a sufficiently broad marketing base – but in what is still an immature sector the discussion is rather pointless as the offering is so varied and patchy as to provide no obvious answers.

To compound matters, specialisms within the digital arena are growing and replicating faster than a swine-flu virus. We now have SEO, PPC, mobile, content, ecommerce, content production, international, email, research specialists and many, many more.

Nobody but the biggest digital agencies (big bucks) can keep the depth of expertise on their books to bring together the right mix of specialisms required for even moderately complex solutions. But few clients, particularly SMEs, have either the physical resource or the knowledge to assemble the right team of suppliers for an à la carte solution. The instinct of a big agency is do as much internally as they can; it maintains control and maximises revenue. But to provide a client with the most effective, and cost-effective programme, they need to take a more project management role.

The alternative is for clients to employ a digital project manager to manage the best possible team of disciplines to achieve their strategy.

 

Is CMS changing the face of digital project management?

Content management systems have been around a long time. Once they were custom-built and strictly for big organisations with the money to pay for them. Today they are commonplace for even the smallest enterprise. Building on frameworks such as Joomla they have shifted the project emphasis away from the management of development to the management of content.

This has some interesting consequences: the development of structure is far more in the hands of the managers. Does this make ’strategy creep’ more or less likely? In the previous model, if clients did not get their strategy exactly right, they would change or modify the brief, making amendments throughout the development stage. However, there was usually a substantial cost to these changes, perhaps mitigating against too many changes and (theoretically) an onus on the client to get the strategy right at the start. With a CMS, the client can more easily make changes… even serious structural changes, without such penalties.

So, what is more important, getting the project exactly right… even if you got your initial strategy wrong, or accepting something being 95% right but allowing the other 5% to go through to save costs?

With my project manager’s hat on I hate sloppy planning and I applaud anything that encourages people to get the strategy right at the outset. But in the real world I must accept that clients often DO get the brief wrong or unclear, or situations simply change and it is our job to help them get back on course as painlessly as possible.

The other aspect of the increasing use of the CMS is that it puts the emphasis firmly back on content. That means that it engages the client far more than the developer. There was a time when the the client passed a job over to the developer, with content as an afterthought, expecting the finished project to spring fully formed onto their server. Now the steps are far more synergic: get the design and structure approved, then develop the content… which after all is what the project is all about.

 

What is the most useful tool in project management?

What do you consider your most useful tool in project management… digital or otherwise? Is it your favourite software… critical paths or pertographs, networks on time perhaps… Microsoft project?

My candidate for the most useful tool is the humble post-it note. After the pencil (with an eraser attached) the post-it has been one of my fundamentals for getting to grips with a new project. It is clear, flexible and allows me to be creative and explain processes to clients.  Give me coloured post it notes and a blank wall and I’m in hog-heaven. So… what is your candidate?

 

Manage the project – not the project management.

I was listening to a heated discussion between two managers about project management software. They were both animated and committed advocates for their chosen platforms, and each was obviously a skilled exponent with deep knowledge and understanding.  However, it gave me an eerie reminder of a case recently where a friend was weeping on my shoulder over a current digital project that was way overdue because it looked like it was still a long way from achieving what he as a client wanted.

The manager charged with the project was highly skilled, but talking to him it became clear that he had fallen in love with the process, along the way losing site of the goals and objectives.  It is so fundamental, yet with increasingly sophisticated models, systems and, yes, software, there is an eagerness to get stuck into the process. Sometimes we eed to give ourselves a good kick to remember it is the objective and goals that matter – the process is just a means to those ends.

 

We can do anything!

I’m always amused, and often perplexed when I look at some web developers’ websites and see the list of services they offer – everything from web design, SEO, online advertising, email marketing, CGI, pay-per-click, social internet, electronic pr… partical physics and brain surgery.

Okay, we must make a few assumptions: either they are a huge operation staffed by a range of highly qualified and experienced specialists, or they have working knowledge of a range of skills and buy additional expertise in when they need it, or they have working knowledge of a range of skills and hope they can blag it and the client will not notice.

Having run digital businesses I know two things, (1) there is a wide range of skill sets required across a number of disciplines and nobody can keep on top of more than a couple of them; (2) the economics mean you identify the core skills required to deliver your basic offer, and recruit for those skills.  The honest thing to do then, if clients require extended services is to buy them in. However, many companies anxious to make a quick profit try to deliver on the basis of a little knowledge and do it themselves, not admitting to the client that this is a specialist service they require.

Sophisticated clients understand this, and use maybe one company for their design work, another to do the web-development and another to do their web-marketing and SEO.  There is no reason why smaller companies should not follow a similar route.  We all know of the cowboy, one-man band builder who will do a bit of building, decorating, plumbing, electrical… etc.  But if I want a central heating system putting in, I will go to a plumber… and for a ring main an electrician.

 

Content – the starting point, not an afterthought

Ask any web developer and probably the biggest issues he or she has to deal with is content. All the planning stages are carried out with only broad notions of content. There is a view that it can be simply added at some point down the line. This means approaches may be developed with predictable structures and unimaginative navigation.

Structure and navigation should be emergent from the content. Try taking the content as a starting point, with no preconceptions and building the sitemaps and wireframes out of the content – rather than the other way around.

 

Forget the big fat strategy document

How many times are we handed a big fat strategy document, calculated to induce a hernia before you get back to the car?  And why? Because 99% of it is not strategy. A large proportion is almost certainly research and background – how we got where we are now. Another large chunk will probably be tactics – how we are going to get where we want to be.  Sandwiched between this will hopefully be a thin strategy.

If your strategy is more than one page of A4 you are probably missing the point. When I sit down with a client to plan a digital strategy, there are only four key questions:

• Who are we talking to?
• What do we want to say to them?
• What do we want them to do?
• What impression do we want to leave?

The answers to those questions are the strategy.  Sure,  we need the research to answer those questions, and we will need a tactical plan to put the strategy into operation. All this requires a lot of work, but it is the distillation and clarity that is important – filtering everything down to one single piece of paper. If the  strategy is not clear and simple, how will you be sure you have got there?

 

Digital project management – where did it come from?

Although, as I have discussed before, digital project management is a valuable discipline, I mused for a while on where it came from.  Many digital organisations came from the design and advertising industries, where, although significant project management skills are practised, it is not recognised as a discipline. Having worked in those areas myself for a number of years, I understand that the concept of a project has negative connotations. Project based work means that the company has to constantly be chasing new work – the holy grail is to turn those projects into clients requiring on-going service. The management philosophy is usually built around account handling and account management, rather than project management.

When digital media arrived, the type of work originally undertaken was the building of websites. These were usually individual turnkey projects, and as such were amenable to project management methods and approaches. But what of the other services now offered by companies operating in the digital arena? Web marketing, on-line promotion, and digital communications all can be looked at as on-going processes, rather than finite projects with a beginning and end point. However it could be argued that if a strategy is in place with defined objectives, project management is the route to go.

Okay, I admit a lot of this is semantics and depends upon the taxonomy of roles within an industry sector, and most operations will embody both account and project management disciplines, but I think it is also a reflection of the culture and business philosophies to observe which is dominant within the sector.

 

Digital project management – an underated discipline

There are hundreds of companies and individuals out there to help companies with their digital projects, from web developers to search marketers. But the biggest issue seems to be managing these projects. Big organisations may have a team of managers charged with digital or new media marketing and management, but many do not… and few SME’s have such a resource.  So most organisations dump digital projects on some already overworked marketing or IT person. Most of the problems I see with companies unhappy with their digital marketing stem from failures in project management.

It isn’t a difficult discipline, but does require a broad knowledge of the industry and available technologies and solutions. But above all, it is a process, involving all the tools familiar to project managers in any industry. A good digital project manager – internal or external – is worth their weight in gold.

• Agreeing and setting objectives – obvious but so often overlooked
• Strategy planning – not a 100 page document, the best strategies are less than one side of A4
• Identifying internal resource – do you have the people? Who will execute and manage the project long term?
• Selecting third party help – absolutely critical. There are some great people out there, but a lot of cowboys as well. Your web developer is not necessarily the best person to mount an email marketing campaign or handle your search marketing.
• Identify performance indicators and measurables.
• Creating the digital brief – a verbal briefing is not enough. The terms of the brief should include deliverables, performance indicators, cost indicators and timescales. This will form the basis of contracts with external suppliers.
• Evaluating proposals and tenders – are we sure the outside suppliers understood our brief, and do we understand their proposals.
• Negotiating – life is never straightforward and compromises have to be made
• Liaison – keeping all parties connected
• Reporting – how is the project progressing?  To brief, on time, on cost?
• Time and budgetary control – speaks for itself, but needs constant vigilance
• Sign off – know when the project is over, don’t let it drift. Easier to manage if you set discrete stages.
• Evaluation and tracking – did it work? Quantify the results.

Yes there is a lot to be done and a lot to control on even the simplest projects – this is why things often fail through lack of tight project management. Use a specialist if you can. A friend of mine uses the analogy of needing a shirt: you can either go out and spend £20 on a shirt or you can make one.  You can learn how to do it from a book, buy material from the market, stay up late at nights cutting and sewing and at the end of the day you have saved yourself £20… but would you really want to go out in a shirt you had made yourself?