UX is the new account planning.
As some of you may know, we’ve been looking for someone to start and lead the user experience discipline here at Zeus Jones. As a part of that process, I’ve been meeting with and interviewing a lot of very different UX people – and when I say different I mean it. The difference in backgrounds, approaches, philosophies and definitions of their discipline are often vast and contradictory. Additionally, their career paths to UX are equally diverse. What’s resulted (from my outsider perspective) is a loosely affiliated group of people who’ve come up through classic HCI, cognitive science, computer science, web development, project management, strategy, design, one of the social sciences or who have just “fallen into it somehow.”
My conversations with them could not be more different but have typically fallen into 3 different areas:
- Discussions around research, tools and techniques
- Discussions around execution and design
- Discussions around strategy and ideas
While this might seem confusing, I find it terrifyingly familiar in a host of good and not so good ways. Change the terminology a bit and you could be describing the state of account planning in the early days. In fact, the similarities are striking. You’d find (and maybe still will find) as great a difference in the backgrounds of early planners. Equally you could have three different conversations with three different planners and get three different points of view around the definition and role of planning. In fact, one of the most common questions in an interview was, “what do you think the role of planning is?” It was asked as a proxy for the more direct (but less revealing) what kind of planner are you?
Here’s what I think is good about this all: Planning was one of the first postmodern disciplines in that its express purpose was to bring together two previously separated mindsets that of researcher and that of creative into the development of a strategic framework for communications.
At Fallon I used this chart to describe the different skills a planner could have:
I’d guess the potential skills for a user experience person are just as large if not larger. Ultimately, at Fallon, we had to winnow these down – as it isn’t realistic for one person to do all these things well.
Even with our focused definition, we were still talking about the merger of rigour, curiosity, and creativity. I think the fact that planning (and UX) rely upon both sides of the brain is part of its appeal and part of its effectiveness.
I also think that where planning was the “hot” field in the 90s, UX is the “hot” field of the 00s and that’s good because it attracts the attention of interesting people. Companies read about UX, just as they read about planning and they decide that UX is the strategic advantage they’ve been looking for and all of this helps the discipline grow.
Finally, it’s also great because I think bringing people – real people – and their needs and desires, into the development of anything that’s meant to be used by them – in a creative way – is good practice. It’s hard to think that it can be a bad thing if more thought, care, attention, listening and imagination is done by the people who make the things we all use.
But I said terrifying because I also see early signs of the dysfunction set account planning back for years.
The lack of a universally accepted definition and practice of account planning led to confusion and disappointment for many agencies. Planning went through a boom and an equally public bust as people that agencies had hired to deliver brilliant strategies actually turned out to be frustrated art directors and copywriters who preferred “tweaking” ads to actually adding value. Without an agreed platform, planning was defined by personality. The early planners (in the US) were larger than life characters who tried to create the discipline in their image. Needless to say, they often disagreed and cast an even larger shadow over planning’s effectiveness. Being the “hot” field also meant that complete poseurs were drawn to planning. Many people came into it and hid (often for years) behind their colleagues confusion about what it was they were actually there to do. Instead they replaced substance by “being cool.”
Things got so bad that many agencies disbanded their planning departments entirely. Almost 25 years after the first planner came to the States, things have improved but it’s fair to say planning doesn’t have the sheen it once did.
I think the turning point was return of planning’s focus (in the US) to a strategic discipline and the abandonment of planning’s desire to directly control or affect execution. This took planners out of competition with creatives and designers and into partnership with them. It also clearly defined planning’s area of responsibility as being at the start of projects, creating foundations for great work, rather than at the end of projects, creating research and testing to kill great work.
From the outside, it’s my guess that there’s a similar debate that’s taking place – or perhaps should be taking place within the user experience community. But that’s only my guess…
I started this post via a conversation on Twitter. Fantastically, Matthew has kindly agreed to post the user experience perspective as a companion piece. I can’t wait to hear what he has to say about this. As an IA/UX practitioner who became a planner, he’s far more suited to have written this than me. Matthew, you are hereby tagged. (Go easy on me.)
Finally, if you are a strategic user experience practitioner who can do all of these things and, more importantly, who sees his or her value as bringing experience thinking into the very beginning of solving business problems for clients rather than only building interfaces that help to solve business problems, I’d love to talk.