UX at consulting, agency and in-house: Where to start?

Cesar Barizon
UX Collective
Published in
8 min readAug 14, 2020

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Consulting, Agency or In-House?

I recently received a kind message on LinkedIn, from a young User Experience student, asking for tips on how to start in this beautiful, promising and often scary job. I gave her my two cents on what to focus on, different study fields and what the market is looking like, in our case, Hong Kong.

After exercising my old man wisdom, I realised there’s also a crucial variant in a UX career: the kind of business you work in will mould you if you spend enough time there. Therefore, I decided to give an overview of these different business models to help those new to UX or those considering working in a new area.

Let’s talk about working as a UX for a consulting, agency or in-house company.

I was lucky to balance my experience working in all these areas. Roughly speaking, I spent three years in consultancy, five years in agencies and three more years in in-house.

Let alone five years of internships, from micro-companies (where I worked in someone’s living room — I may share good stories about that in a future post) to multi-nationals.

Firstly, let’s align on some brief definitions:

Consulting: Companies that provide consultancy services that at some stage involve digital products, hiring UX Designers either as a core asset or to supply a temporary demand. Usually focused on one or similar industries.

Agencies: Marketing and advertising companies, mainly focused on creating concepts for short, mid and long term campaigns, for a variety of industries.

In-House: Dedicated team accountable for development, deployment and maintenance of internal products of an organisation.

UX at consulting

You’ll feel like a king at some point. I promise.
You’ll feel like this at some point. I promise.

UX consultants are required when, either a client needs more production power (a.k.a. body shop) or, luckily, wants to adopt user-centred approaches to drive product development.

The major challenge of this area is dealing with uncertainty, pressure and spotlight. It sounds scary, I know, but it also gives you the boost to build up that confidence you were looking for.

Allocations to projects can vary from a few weeks to over a year, and it usually involves working at the client’s location — which can include different cities or even countries. Prepare for changes, continually joining new teams and dealing with numerous stakeholders.

Once allocated, a UX Consultant will have just a few days to “master” the client’s business before starting to craft solutions and, if a senior designer, leading teams they’ve never worked with before. There’s a high expectation on outputs and adaptability, and it is common to become the “go-to” person for entire departments within the client’s organisation, even those unrelated to your project. And if that happens, it means you’re doing a great job!

But hard skills aren’t nearly enough for consultants. Don’t forget you are the face of your company in the client’s day-to-day workspace. So, make sure you dedicate enough time to build good relationships. Consulting is not for you if you need to work with your headphones on all the time. It’s a “show face” sort of thing, you know? Don’t hide behind your desk.

"Be water, my friend."

Be water, my friend. Consultants must be enablers. Especially when working with large and traditional companies that have dreadful approval processes and routines, stay calm and adapt. Be water.

Keep in mind that consultants are brought in to help with some deficiency: productivity, strategic or processual. And the client’s organisation can’t and will not change, in a reasonable time, so that you can work in an ideal scenario.
Always point out your suggestions for a more efficient work environment, but most importantly, be ready to quickly respond to a non-ideal situation.

Last but not least: Keep eyes wide open for needs and opportunities that may open new doors. However, and I can’t stress this enough, be sensible and ethical when exploring and proposing new businesses, as pushing too hard can backfire. Badly. For your reputation and consequently for your company’s relationship.
I believe a UX Consultant is a skilled resource assisting a qualified demand, not an infiltrated salesperson — although some consulting companies think differently and use sales as a primary evaluation criterion. Make sure you discuss this with your company if you’re considering working in the field.

UX at agency

All around the world, agencies are (in)famous for two things:

  1. Having a large wall to proudly exhibit awards that only agencies care about;
  2. Consuming tons of pizzas yearly to feed those creative minds that had to work overtime to meet deadlines.
How much is your pizza worth?
How much is your pizza worth?

It sounds harsh and unfun, but I assure you it can be pretty awesome! Very tiring, indeed, but worth it!

At agencies, UX Designers will deal with a variety of clients from diverse industries, keeping you from getting stuck to a single mindset, requiring different solutions and approaches.

It also gives the chance to work with a multitude of media: LPs, apps, website, activation campaigns, kiosks, events, audio & video. You name it. This plethora of possibilities will force designers to work closely with many departments, such as Strategy, Client Engagement, Project Management, Development and so forth.

No room for boredom.
No room for boredom.

Agencies are a fantastic laboratory. Creativity is encouraged and rewarded.

It’s common to rearrange teams to better suit a specific project, for example. There is room to go beyond common sense and suggest a usability test for a physical kiosk, for instance. Remember the wall with awards? There you go.

Boredom is rarely an issue as there is always something new coming and going.
New challenges drop in your lap on a daily basis, so if you don’t like coffee, get ready to question your habits, because you’ll need a caffeine boost.

The price can be quite high, though: The pace and deadlines are notoriously cruel. It is not uncommon to know someone who had a burnout or felt they couldn’t keep up for too long.

Having pizzas with your colleagues late on a Friday night while you finish sketching the last 30 screens for an app can be jolly fun for once.
When it becomes the rule and deadlines are agreed upon with the (undisclosed) expectation that working over 40 hours/week is an acceptable routine, it’s time to rethink things. On top of that, not paying overtime is, unfortunately, a common practice amongst agencies, that sometimes try to compensate with a start-up alike structure, offering cool game and relaxing rooms. Hear me out on this: If you have no time to go home, you won’t have time to enjoy the game room either.

All in all, I’d say agencies are likely the best places for those starting in UX, as they’ll have the chance to develop their skills across industries and media. The fast pace can also be attractive for young designers, seeking constant new challenges.

UX at in-house

I like to think of in-house jobs as those stable, long-term relationships your mom always dreamed you’d find one day. Some may be sceptical about how exciting it can be. Some may seek it wildly.

Dogs are great in relationships too!
Dogs are great in relationships too!

In-house teams are the supreme masters of their destinies. Okay, maybe not.

They develop their own products, at their own pace, and that can be a blessing or a curse. The real challenge here is to keep things going and make sure actual deliveries happen consistently.
Excess of resources, such as time or budget can, in reality, hamper an efficient project plan as well as the lack of it.

Design processes happen in cycles and need to be followed carefully ensuring controlled progress. Stretched timelines, for instance, can unintentionally encourage over documentation — a true nightmare — or loosen up the team’s grip, producing an untrackable puzzle of decisions.

UX Designers are usually the backbone of an in-house team — depending on the company’s UX maturity level, naturally. Hopefully, the company you’re considering is at least moving from level 2 to 3.

UX Maturity Stages
UX Collective: Assessing the UX maturity stage of your organisation

If so, there’s enormous potential for you to work your way up and show the UX value, finding internal support to propel the maturity to the next levels.

I need to be realistic, though: This is not an easy job and will not happen overnight. The larger the company, the larger the cliff in between UX adoption stages. But hey, that’s not the only goal of working in in-house!

Typically, consulting and agency designers work on a project for a determined period, deliver the solution and move on to the next product. As clients own the data and analytics of their products, with very few exceptions, designers have no access to this valuable information, so they can’t follow up, breaking the lovely design cycle.

And this is by far my favourite perk of in-house work: designers can see their creations alive and even better, observe performance and learn with data. The proximity with data and development teams keep this iteration reasonably efficient, and small improvements can be released and tested again, and again. It’s an incredible lab for experimentation and learning.

As I hinted previously, many in-house designers agree that the pace can be a bit slow and the lack of variety of products can be a challenge for motivation.

In sum

Fine. Can you sum this up?
Happily!

Summary about working at Consulting, Agencies and In-House companies

Disclaimer

Don’t feel frustrated if you’ve had a different experience working for one of these companies. :)

I admittedly wrote a generalised overview based on my own experiences and years of conversations with peers (mostly working for mid and large-sized multi-national companies), to offer a consolidated guide for new UX adventurers.

Companies size, location and culture, UX maturity level, etc. may profoundly change the characteristics I suggested here.

The UX Collective donates US$1 for each article published in our platform. This story contributed to Bay Area Black Designers: a professional development community for Black people who are digital designers and researchers in the San Francisco Bay Area. By joining together in community, members share inspiration, connection, peer mentorship, professional development, resources, feedback, support, and resilience. Silence against systemic racism is not an option. Build the design community you believe in.

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