Designing in hostile environments

When your employer doesn’t really want a UX team

When your employer doesn’t really want a UX team

I have recently, finally moved on from an 8 year stint in various marketing agencies. I went in as a UX Lead and evolved through various roles into a Head of UX / Experience Design.

There are a lot of things I could reveal, which would get me in all kinds of trouble, so for now let’s just focus on what it’s like to fight for users in an environment that actively wants to disregard any kind of UX process or rigour.

I’ll save the messy stuff for another day.

Originally I was attracted to the idea of a full service agency because there was variety, scope, the kind of resource you don't get in small UX agencies, and occasionally deeply complex multichannel UX work that I could get my teeth into.

But overall the environment, the culture and the attitude of management towards UX as a craft was so incompatible to the mental wellbeing of any half-decent UX practitioner that I saw more than a few colleagues run screaming for the hills.

I genuinely thought it would change or I could change it, but sadly, eventually, even I had to give it up as a bad job (in every sense).

But it wasn’t until my final few months, as I reflected on all that had gone before, that I realised why I’d always struggled to get UX work recognised and respected, and why I should have given up a lot earlier.

Based on more than 8 years of experience, here are 5 reasons why UX does not ‘fit’ in today’s marketing agency environment:

1. The processes do not match

In UX work, the standard principles of user-centred design, aka The Scientific Method, require research to understand all parties’ requirements before something is designed.

Whereas the Marketing agency approach to design is ‘show me and I’ll choose’.

This means that they take the loosest possible request from a client (who they are terrified of asking any real questions — see below) brief a designer who makes up <something>, some internal people decide if they like it or not (and then make arbitrary changes based on their opinions), and then the client is ‘sold’ the solution as matching their request.

As you can see, they are different approaches. And one cannot do both.

As a result, we just end up with one side or the other being frustrated. Either UX people insist on more information, research, process, time etc and are seen as “difficult” … or we allow ourselves to be used as concept monkeys, producing random opinion-based designs until we lose the will to live.

Given who’s paying the salaries, guess who wins..?

2. Evidence is feared

Marketing agencies talk a good game about research and evidence, but based on everything I’ve seen in 8 years, what they pass off as research or evidence is a million years away from anything a decent UX Researcher would produce.

Instead of discovery stage user research, they brief ‘planners’ to scrape the internet for third party ‘research’ of dubious provenance and validity*, crafting it into ‘insight’ (a powerpoint deck) that is then used to ‘inspire’ the creative team whose job is to make up an answer. The creative team have all the power in a marketing agency, so if they don’t like the ‘insight’ they will simply change it.

Then, instead of user testing a solution and iterating based on evidence, they will maybe.. sometimes.. perhaps tolerate a focus group or survey to ‘validate’ a concept. If the results do not validate decisions, then the research is dismissed.

The idea of doing any primary research is frequently met with horror; it will take time, it will use up the budget and might produce information (aka reality) that we will have to hide if it disproves the solution we like for Reasons.

3. Questions are discouraged

Because most of the people in power are ‘client service’ people rather than practitioners of any specific craft, there is a deep systemic fear of looking like you don’t know what you are doing**; therefore everyone is discouraged at all times from asking questions, especially to or in front of a client.

You can imagine what response a UX person gets when they ask questions. Yes that’s right, we’re labelled ‘difficult’. Especially if you ask questions about why there’s no evidence, or why we aren’t following a proper design process.

The problem with you, is that you ask too many questions

4. UX success with clients is a threat

Despite the epic wall of UX resistance inside the typical marketing agency, as it turned out over and over during the last 8 years, clients loved user-centred design processes because they make business sense.

They like evidence because it removes risk, they like knowledgable people who ask questions because it shows respect and interest in their businesses and they liked being listened to and not being ‘sold’ to all the time.

Because of this, clients brought work directly to me and my teams, requesting our processes and methodologies. This causes enormous political issues within the agency because:

a) UX is making money (the point of the marketing agency) but also

b) UX is doing all the things the agency perceives as a threat

This is a level of cognitive dissonance that no one is comfortable with, and it makes for a very uncomfortable working environment between UX and senior management.

As a UX leader, you have to choose whether to toe the line, make up nonsense and never do any good UX work — or fight for process, practice and client outcomes, which will make you massively unpopular with senior management.

Guess which I fought for for 8 years. Idiot.

5. Surrounded by idiots (the book, obvs)

This was my biggest realisation and the final “aha!” in the coffin of my marketing agency career — I read the book “Surrounded by Idiots” by Thomas Erikson and it changed my entire outlook on working environments and where UX sits within them.

https://amzn.to/43VUQZK

In short, there are four personality ‘types’, and most people are 1 or 2 types combined.