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.
Tags: planning
Links - September 11th 2008 « Curiously Persistent Says:
September 11th, 2008 at 9:22 am[...] - Great Quotes for PlannersUX is the new account planning.- Media History Through Gartner Hype Cycle Graphs: 1995-2008- Future PerfectFuture Social- A List of [...]
Steve Chamberlain Says:
September 11th, 2008 at 3:18 pmGreat post, Adrian.
Weekly Points of Interest 2008-09-11 at Experience Matters Says:
September 12th, 2008 at 10:25 am[...] UX is the New Account Planning [...]
dirk shaw Says:
September 12th, 2008 at 3:27 pmThis post is very appropriate for the change effort i am leading. While we never have had an account planning group in the traditional agency sense, our account executives still go thru account planning for positioning our software.
We offer a range of products for personalization, social computing and web content management. Historically we would go in and describe the latest greatest widget,version x.1.1.1 and never make the connection to how this impacts the end user and their bottom line.
We are now shifting the conversation from features and functions to what a future state user experience can be thru rapid prototyping. As part of the concepting stage we also outline the key areas of opportunity to enhance business value and a measurement plan. This pretty much categorizes our approach to strategy and ideas as we leverage partners to execute on the first two points.
This approach has been extremely successful and proves the value customer centric storytelling and conveying ideas thru pictures..
Just thought i would share another example of how UX is transforming the front end of a sales process…
Dirk
Carlos Abler Says:
September 12th, 2008 at 7:31 pmGood design optimizes the emergence of desirable practical and experiential outcomes.
The Holy Grail is to reconcile the Human Factors/Interaction Designer discipline stream, with the aesthetic/content/experiential focused discipline stream.
The key is to find project architects who are versed enough about all those disciplines to be able to orchestrate projects that balance these streams. Unlike the dotcom era, we now have a far larger number of talent convergent types.
We are a young industry who is still reinventing wheels, finding out what is truly unique about our contexts and creations, all of it.
When I got into interactive I came from a multimedia production and film studies background. What blew my mind is how a role analagous to the ‘director’ in cinema, did not exist as a well defined role on so many interactive teams. There was the big struggle between the various left-brainers and right-brainers. A good illustration of what I think the missing directorial role was, was expressed in an Ingmar Bergman interview. Paraphrasing, he knew enough about the technology of his craft to be able to communicated the details of his vision, and to not take crap from technicians who would say that certain things were not possible, because he knew they were, just not easy.
So think of the director in this way; he owns the bottom line of the story and translates to a technical staff. The director is the third leg of a stool. But if your director is lop-sided in education about any of the two, it will show, and others will have to pick up the pieces and mop up the splatter. For example, having aesthetic only design types having executive authority over interaction design projects is like having a production designer decide where the cameras are going to go. Especially if the tasks and audiences are multiplied as they are in today’s content and utility rich web sites.
Human factors education is just getting going in arenas that produce professional strategists, architects, designers and developers. Alot of web-focused interaction and experience design books that take today’s needs and the evolved computer competencies into account, could only have been written recently. Schools are finally getting this into their curriculums. More design schools are offering interaction design.
Dotcom era: was kinda like if the film industry in the 20’s suddenly had Steven Spielberg budgets and were instantly granted sound and color at the same time. Think about the crisis in role definition transitioning from the prior era, and not yet developing roles, work-flow and best practices, for dealing in the new era. The Suits, the Aesthetic Phreaks, the Concept Heads, and Nerds shouting a across canyons of zero common ground.
Thanks for making me rant. It’s your fault.
Carlos Abler
Helge Tennø Says:
September 14th, 2008 at 7:31 amExcellent post Adrian, thanks for sharing. Loving the planner cake diagram.
David Carruthers designed an excellent poster describing the interface between the Planner and the IA/UX expert.
One can find it on the euroia2007 webpage:
Planning & IA – How will IAs work with Advertising, as Marketing Communications become more integrated
David Carruthers, twentysix London, UK
http://www.euroia.org/2007/Posters.aspx
Ryan Says:
September 16th, 2008 at 2:09 pmI see UX as the intersection of logic and creative: the marriage of strategy and execution, of design with technology, human needs with business needs, person with medium, and so on.
To me, that’s the heart of the discipline, and it shows up in a lot of ways. I think we embody that, both as individuals within the practice, and even more powerfully, as members of teams.
As one of my colleagues pointed out in discussing this excellent post, divorcing strategy from execution leaves a gap–and, as nature abhors a vaccuum, thence the emerging prominence of the UX discipline in the agency.
I also appreciate your warning about the consequences of lack of clarity around the role of the discipline. While part of me thinks the debate is healthy, I also think there’s an identity crisis in IA and UX (and all the other related disciplines) that’s mostly about defensiveness, a needing to justify our existence and lobby for a seat at the table. That argument, from where I sit, appears over–let’s move on.
Linkdump | ettf.net Says:
September 19th, 2008 at 7:14 am[...] Experience (UX) is the new account planning (also check out a post on [...]
Roller og oppgaver for Account Planners : apgnorway Says:
September 21st, 2008 at 8:47 am[...] kunnskapen og menneskene fra UX-miljøet opp mot oppgavene til byrået og plannerne, henter Adrian hos Zeus Jones frem en plansje fra Fallon som viser fem ulike [...]
links for 2008-09-26 at nathan williams | simiant.com Says:
September 26th, 2008 at 7:02 am[...] From The Head Of Zeus Jones » Blog Archive » UX is the new account planning. (tags: advertising brand strategy planning experience accountplanning branding interactiondesign) [...]
interaction - Alfred Malmros ☞ Says:
November 18th, 2008 at 7:02 pm[...] most intriguing thing about Interaction Design, or User Experience or however you choose to define it (I’m not going to try in this short blog post), is that [...]