Half inspired by Google’s Chrome comics, half by T. Scott Stromberg’s sketch notes from Adaptive Path’s UX Week, I attached a comic-like drawing to this article. The drawing includes some of the sentences I hear often at the office from the mouths of different members of the team, including my own.

Previously, in my first article about the problems of getting a traditional ad agency thinking and working digitally, I’ve mentioned how digital work needs more process. Truth is that the kind of work – Facebook apps, rich microsites, online tools and services – that we design and develop today for marketing purposes online, is closer to software applications – no, not just closer, but it is software – than pages and pages of text and image, text and image, maybe an animation, here and there. We are not developing digital versions of posters to put online, but little computer programs that help our clients to reach their target audience and to sell their product.

For most people, that is probably easy to recognize, at least on some level. But when people recognize that, they should also recognize what it means in terms of the work process. It means that we need a clear understanding, on all levels, of each others’ roles and what it is that we are all doing, together and individually, and it means that we need a clear step-by-step process that everybody can agree on, to enable all of us to do our work efficiently and help manage both the client’s expectations and our own.

The greatest difficulty in my own team now still is that certain people don’t understand how to use or place an information architect/user experience designer, and what the IA/UXD needs to get his/her work done. People who sell the work to our clients usually don’t involve an IA in the work from the beginning of pitching, and don’t know what definition and discovery work is, but keep the project in their own hands until they’ve developed a concept or strategy of some sort, sold it to the client, and now there’s three to four weeks left to develop it. That’s when it’s tossed on to designers and developers who then have to struggle to put it together in time. IA/UXD maybe gets to “oversee” the work later on and answer some “tricky usability questions” when they come up, usually after the site has already been built, but not yet launched.

Another problem is that a lot of our people don’t see IAs as the designers or developers of the “creative solution”, which, in real terms, usually means the whole concept of the site/microsite/application. They see IAs as some usability specialists, who can isolate “usability” off the product at any point of the process, give Jakob Nielsen-type recommendations and answers to some very specific areas, and then be left out of much of the work again. In their eyes, it’s the art director and copywriter who do the creative work.

Then there is, of course, the client, who everybody can always blame. It’s the client who doesn’t want to give us more time, it’s the client who doesn’t know how to look at wireframes, it’s the client who doesn’t understand this. But, knowing that there will always be some “difficult” clients and challenging timelines, I’m not nearly as concerned about our clients as I am about our own team. Our team needs to develop our knowledge of this work. Clients don’t need to know exactly how we are supposed to work and get the best products done – if they did, then they probably wouldn’t need to come to us agencies anymore? We are the ones who need to master our own work, not the client.

What we need is a number of well-executed, well worked projects, where we use the proper process and roles, that we can then use as examples to show everybody how the right process makes the work easier, not more complicated, for everybody. Right now we have a couple examples of projects where we are getting in the right direction – we just need more to make it our consistent approach and to get everybody on board.