I gave you everything you ever wanted; it wasn’t what you wanted
It can be challenging for any UX consultant who is representing the user to be simultaneously easy to work with and add value.
4 min read
Feb 2018
The classic criticism levelled at consultants is that they borrow your watch then tell you the time. They are notorious for asking lots of questions and reporting back with little more than a glorified transcription in a 50-page report, 40 pages of which are part of an off-the-shelf template.
This same observation, viewed through the lens of the consultant rather than the client is that consultants are under significant pressure to give those who have commissioned them the exact outcome they desire and so generally need to start any engagement by earning the right to challenge, an essential ingredient of adding actual (as well as perceived) value.
To earn the right the consultant needs to give the client confidence around two things:
That they have invested substantial time and have adequate intellectual capacity to comprehensively understand their business needs and the problem they have been engaged to solve.
That they have a strong grasp of their own specialism, through a mixture of commitment to the theory, experience over many years and the application of the theory to the problem at hand.
Yet still consultants and agencies can come under pressure not just to solve problems for clients, but to solve those problems exactly the way the client wants. The challenge applies to lots of disciplines, but is particularly acute in design, with its pesky subjectivity.
And it’s particularly acute in UX, where organisations often get better results by ceding design decisions to their users. The problems which UX design typically helps solve are to sell more, improve efficiency, cut costs, enhance marketplace position, increase customer satisfaction, ward off competitive threat and build brand. Perhaps counter-intuitively, these goals are most commonly achieved by the organisation getting less of what it wanted and giving the customer more of what they wanted.
The B2B website should be built around customer problems, sectors and tasks rather than the organisation’s internal departments or live marketing campaigns
Navigation uses customer language, not clever branded or industry-speak terminology, allowing visitors to plot their own way through a website
Prospects can determine if and when they want to get in touch or line up a sales call, by empowering them with all the pre-sales information they need such as case studies, pricing, and implementation planning
Progress indication is clear and obvious, whether that is product task flow, software onboarding or e-commerce flow, giving users confidence on what has been completed, what needs to be done now and what happens next
Shoppers can find, filter and sort according to what matters to them, and enabling easy comparison
Users have meaningful control over notifications, privacy, permissions, subscriptions and channel choice
Each of these requires knowing the customer – their problems, their language, their mental model for the buying process, the parts of the journey which are particularly stressful for them, how they want to decide and buy – and then responding by designing around those insights.
They are notorious for asking lots of questions and reporting back with little more than a glorified transcription in a 50-page report, 40 pages of which are part of an off-the-shelf template.
The uncomfortable truth about hiring a UX consultant therefore is that they are almost certainly going to tell you that you can’t have some of the things you want. That’s not because the consultant is always right or that the client shouldn’t challenge recommendations. Rather it highlights the important distinction between the desired outcome and the preferred solution. Clients should be demanding around the former, but open-minded around the latter.
The emotional contract between the consultant and the client might therefore look like this.
A consultant who agrees to everything may be easy to work with but is unlikely to be adding much value. Sometimes the most useful contribution a consultant can make is a well-researched, carefully explained and evidence-based “no”.
In return, clients might embrace the paradox that if consultants simply ‘gave you everything you ever wanted, it wouldn’t be what you wanted’.
