Defining the right process, roles and vision for digital work at a traditionally analog, mass advertising agency has turned out to be a challenging, often frustrating project. People who already have years of experience in seemingly similar, but yet so different business, clearly have a hard time understanding the requirements of digital work, and the importance and value of IA/IxD/UXD’s role in the process. But with thousands of professionals trained in traditional advertising and hundreds of agencies creating offline ads in this world where a lot of things are going digital, there have to be ways how we can all learn and develop the new ways of working in order to survive.

My experience in roles dealing with online information architecture, interaction and user experience design and concept development is mostly from a country where IAs – or concept designers as they’re known there – have been a recognized part of the team at digital agencies for close to ten years. Starting work in a new country at a new agency six months ago, I did not expect to have to start from the kind of basics that I am dealing with now – from having to explain and justify the role of IA/UXD as part of Web design.

It starts from the process
Where I come from, (nearly) all agencies have adopted at least some form of a simple waterfall process, if not a more developed, agile model, to follow in the way they sell projects to their clients and the way that the team works and the roles are defined. Here I’ve hit a situation where there seems to be little knowledge of the process, and interaction and user experience designers are a much more rare breed. There aren’t IAs at every agency here. The four steps of discovery, design, development, and deployment don’t seem like natural talk to many people in the business.

In traditional advertising, it’s the dynamic duo of an art director and a copywriter that runs much of the show, and the creative “big idea” that the duo develops can easily take 75% of the project timeline. When you are working with a print poster, the visual design and content elements of the poster can keep changing literally until the moment the poster goes to print. But in the online world, of course, it’s different. Elements need to be discovered, defined, and designed in steps. Interaction design needs to play a significant role in the work process. The discussion can’t be just between the image and the text – the designer and the writer – without thinking of the interaction, the links, the technical functionality, all that goes into creating an online application or a website.

More to come
I’ve been working in the midst of the legacy of an old mass advertising agency for a little while now, and while we have made some progress, I still feel like we haven’t got very far. In these six months, while struggling through day-to-day work, I first slowly realized the need for education, examples, templates and management among the team, and now that I have got some help and gathered material, I’ve started giving presentations to the team. I will share the slides here a bit later, when I dig deeper into this topic. In the meanwhile, here’s a link to another blog article touching the same topic:
Learnings and frustrations of a marketing IA by Werner Puchert