Stop renting user experience

Pictured: UX Consultants

Consultants are a wonderful thing. A good one is like the steely-eyed antihero in a spaghetti western — walking into town with a laconic confidence and dispatching a posse’s worth of problems for a handful of silver. In the freelancer economy, it can be tempting to view consultants as the equivalent of cloud services — spin them up as you need them to bootstrap up to the next level. Digital skill sets in particular are more appealing to rent than to own. Digital expertise is much in demand and experienced hires command hefty salaries. Payroll is better spent on core business functions like sales, marketing, and operations. Sure, you’ll end up swallowing some nerd’s unpalatable hourly rate once in a while, but those occasions are rare enough.

Personally, I’ve benefited from this approach. As an experienced UX consultant, I can charge a healthy nerd rate and maintain an enviable degree of flexibility for travel, school field trips, and all-day Olympic curling marathons. (Go Canada!) My clients call me when they have a problem or a new project and have the freedom to tell me to leave when the mess has been cleaned up. On paper, it looks like a win-win. But some of my clients may be making a mistake.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a conscientious, hard working, knowledgeable mensch of a consultant. (Winning smile.) But I think that relying on consultants and vendors to make sense of your user experience is a poor business decision.

What are vendors for?

There are times when bringing in an outsider is a great idea whether you’re hiring a consultant, a freelancer, or a digital agency to help you with digital initiatives. Here are three times when hiring a vendor makes all kinds of sense:

1. To gain outside perspectives: We all get into our little bubbles, companies as well as people. It’s hard to spot our own unexamined assumptions because they’re, well, unexamined. An experienced vendor has the benefit of a broader range of experiences across multiple categories and verticals. They can ask you questions you wouldn’t necessarily think to ask and expose you to best practices that have been proven in other categories.
2. To gain specialty skills: The other day I worked with a client to develop a measurement plan for their digital properties and then created the triggers and tags in Google Tag Manager to transmit their key conversion data to Google Analytics. For the majority of companies, this type of expertise will be needed only on rare occasions. It makes no sense to hire an employee for this set of skills. There are a whole range of specialty skills that don’t need to be permanent features on a company payroll. A skill fits into this category if the need arises rarely or is likely to be a one-time expense.
3. To expand capacity: Your business has suddenly gotten busy. Maybe demand for your product is seasonal. Maybe you’re growing quickly and you just need to meet immediate customer needs while you make longer term staffing decisions. Maybe you have more corporate initiatives than your current staffing can support. It’s all good. Bring in the freelancers! Of course, adding capacity this way is like sending troops to Afghanistan. It’s all fun and giggles in the short term, but you need to have an exit strategy.

What aren’t vendors for?

Vendors sound awesome! And they are (I am) some of the time. However, there are a few situations in which bringing in outsiders is a bad idea.

1. To make up your mind. Half of your company believes in one approach to digital initiatives. The other half insists another approach is correct. Management isn’t sure what to think. Let’s bring in a consultant to break the tie! Wrong. This is organizational fecklessness. Digital is core to your business nowadays (I’m guessing). Relying on a vendor to tell you how to move into the future is precisely the wrong approach. No one internal owns the new approach so no one is invested in pushing and adapting when things inevitably get tough. If you don’t have people inside your organization to set a digital strategy, you have the wrong people inside your organization.
2. To provide focus. You know you should rebuild the website/create an app/re-platform your core product for the web. But the organization lacks the internal will to get this done. So you hire a consultant or a vendor and pay them a whole lot of money to provide you with the focus you are lacking. Surely, the vendor’s hefty fees will force your organization to concentrate. Wrong. You may need a vendor to guide you through the process or handle the build. But your vendor will inevitably fail if they don’t have an internal advocate. Vendors and consultants depend on repeat business in order to survive. That creates a certain disincentive for them to tell anyone in your organization when they are wrong or when they are distracting from the core mission. Some vendors may even encourage mission-creep as a way to pad their fees. Focus should precede the RFP.
3. To replace internal resources. Don’t be silly! Of course, you can use consultants in place of full time employees. We’re all freelancers now! Everyone is replaceable. Every core function can be outsourced to a consultant or vendor. Your company is virtualized. Your office is open plan. This is the brave new world. Wrong. (Very wrong.) Think of the most successful, forward-thinking companies. You probably came up with some combination of Apple, Facebook, Google, and Amazon. These also happen to be the companies who are hiring the most people. They aren’t hiring freelancers or consultants to handle their digital initiatives. (Trust me, they’re not.) They want to own the skill sets that are most important to their business. They don’t want their core expertise to walk out the door tomorrow because they got a better day rate. In fact, they do the opposite of hire freelancers, they hire owners. It’s called stock options.

Pictured: A Cautionary Tale.

So where does UX fit in?

Many businesses view user experience as the type of “specialty skill” that they can outsource at need to a consultant. This isn’t surprising. UX is easy to file away with a number of skill sets that we’re used to farming out to vendors. User experience, digital design, programming — that’s the whole selling proposition for digital agencies. Sure, user experience is important when you’re building a website, but it’s not something you need all the time, right?

When I started building websites, this was certainly true. Websites were little more than digital brochures back then. You needed to have a website, just like you needed to have a business card. It was just a way to tell people you were for real. Back in the day, I worked on a website for a software product with an 800 number to call so customers could buy the product on a CD-rom which would then arrive in the mail. How quaint.

Digital properties are very different now. By slow degrees many businesses have evolved from the website as brochureware to ecommerce platform to gateway to a fully web-based product. Yet many companies continue to behave as if their digital properties are “just marketing”, ignoring the fact that marketing, sales, operations and product design are all blended on digital platforms. At the core of this new digital blending of core business functions is the evolving discipline of user experience. However, it is difficult for a company to grasp their total UX needs since these needs are split across multiple divisions. Marketers need UX for marketing activities. Product designers need UX for the product. Even HR needs UX for internal tools.

The implication is clear: as digital has evolved from simply a channel to the irreplaceable core of many businesses, UX has evolved from a value-add provided by digital agencies to a core business function — marketing, sales, operations, and user experience. It’s not a specialty skill. It’s your customer’s and potential customer’s experience of your company.

Planning for Problems

As platforms evolve and technology changes, today’s cutting-edge digital design becomes tomorrow’s hopeless anachronism. Websites are not a once-every-five-years expense. In truth, they aren’t even a once-a-year expense. Websites need to be changing constantly. Security updates alone require constant vigilance. But it’s the ubiquity of web analytics that ultimately drive the frequency of iteration. After all, if you don’t intend to act on your analytics data, there is little purpose to collecting it. It’s like ignoring the red light on the dashboard. After a few weeks, you can’t be surprised when the car won’t start.

After a few months (weeks?) of collecting analytics data, you have a pretty good sense which sections of the site, app, or digital product could do with some improvement. The abandoned shopping carts. The page with high drop-off rates. The undiscovered, unexplored branches of your site map. Despite the importance of digital properties to a successful business, too many companies ignore the evidence of hemorrhaging money and user engagement, confining these issues to some far-off “phase 2”.

Why delay needed improvements? Because the company has engaged in a little wishful-thinking where digital infrastructure is concerned. The redesign and the new build was budgeted against the previous fiscal year. This year’s threadbare maintenance budget doesn’t allow for improvements. “Out of scope” your digital agency assures you with ill-disguised schadenfreude. I understand the challenge for the much-abused CMO or CTO. It’s hard enough to get the money budgeted for a digital initiative. Telling your CEO that digital is going to become a permanent, annual expense is a losing argument.

But digital is a permanent, annual expense.

This is the decidedly unsexy part of our brave new digital world. New designs are fun, builds are fun, even measurement plans and data analytics can be fun. Including 30% of the initial build cost as a permanent feature of your annual budget is less thrilling. But this would be the minimum budgetary requirement for a company that takes data and optimization seriously.

Someone has to own the unpleasant task of following the elephant in the parade with a shovel. Ideally, the same user experience specialist who helped to shape the digital property and aided in the development of the measurement plan is available to evaluate successes and correct for failures. A consultant or vendor could fill this role, assuming they are available, not too expensive, and personally dedicated to the success of your business. If you find such an individual (presumably in the company of Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and Bigfoot), it might just be best to hire them to a permanent position.

Isn’t it a little stupid for me to be writing this?

Yes and no. (Mostly yes.) I do make my money as a UX consultant and I seem to be arguing that UX consultants are a bad idea. But my actual point isn’t nearly so self-sabotaging. Working with a digital agency or a consultant or a freelancer on user experience can be a good idea to gain outside perspectives, acquire specialty skills, or add capacity to your internal UX resources. But the expertise those consultants bring to your company needs to be complemented by an internal understanding of user experience. Just as you hire an advertising agency, but still employ a marketing manager. User experience is something your company needs to own. UX is a core business function. And it’s a mistake to rent core business functions.