A few weeks ago I wrote a post about the role of user experience designers at ad agencies. The point of the post wasn’t that agencies should get rid of their UX designers, but quite the opposite: that (user) experience design, and, more broadly, functional design thinking, need to be given a stronger, more holistic role, instead of just adding specialists to try to bring in aspects of UXD to the process.

How Does It Work?

That user experience design should be, on some level, the responsibility of the whole team, and not just one department or person, must sound like common sense to most. The statement that user experience design needs to be integrated into everything the team does is quite easily repeatable mantra. We’ll get there, if we just keep educating our team about UXD, right?

There is a great variety of different situations, agencies, teams and individuals. The approach where a highly specialized UX designer works together with “creatives” who lead other aspects undoubtedly does work in some places. But there are other issues that, in the end, may not be solved by that solution.

CD vs. UX Designer

Traditionally at ad agencies, the ideation process is led by the creative director together with the copywriter and the art director. They develop the Big Idea: the basis of the advertising product that is then created. As the center of that process, the creative director commonly uses the most amount of power to shape the idea.

That scenario, in and of itself, may not be in direct conflict with the role of a user experience designer. But if people agree that user experience design is multi-faceted and not just about usability, information architecture or any other one, separable and highly specialized field, and if people also agree that user experience design is not a checkbox, not just one step in the process, then doesn’t it start to sound like the user experience designer also needs to have a more directorial position in the process? And, vice versa, the creative director needs to have a very solid understanding of UXD himself. Andrew Maier wrote a good article about User Experience Designer vs. Creative Director for UX Booth in September, and I recommend it as further reading. What are your thoughts on it?

Traditional Advertising vs. Advertising in the Digital Era

Today’s best ad campaigns are not campaigns at all: they’re highly functional, self-sustaining platforms, as testified by AdWeek in their choice to award Nike Plus as the “digital campaign of the decade”. They’re more like services and tools, real products, than just effective messaging, like the Big Ideas of the past. If the creative director keeps leading the ideation process to create Big Ideas along the same lines as in the past, while a user experience designer brings UXD-thinking to it, how do the real killer concepts, ideas of functionality, not just messaging, that the world needs today, come up? Jim Lansbury has written a great post about this for Adweek: Goodbye, Art & Copy — Hello, Idea Engineers, and R/GA’s CCO Nick Law wrote an excellent description of the situation back in March ’08: The Next Creative Revolution.

Proven Models

The old models of creating advertising are well tested and proven over decades of traditional marketing. There’s no reason why they should be completely disregarded now.

But a more radical, new model of the creation process, to produce the kind of functional concepts and platforms I described above, has already been proven as well. As an example, in the Nordics there are agencies whose steady stream of Lions, Eurobests, Webbys and other awards hasn’t gone unnoticed in North America, either. Many of those agencies and the people they employ didn’t come from a long traditional advertising background, but have built their work on a different model and mindset.

When I worked in the Nordics myself, in most cases we didn’t have people with the creative director title. Instead, we had concept designers: ideation leaders who, together with the team, guided the development towards functional concepts while bringing in a strong sense of user experience design and an understanding of interaction and information architecture. Depending on the project and the idea, there were then also other, even more specialized UXD types who were brought in to help work the initial idea more in detail later in the process.

At best at those agencies, we created concepts quite similar to the thinking behind Nike Plus: platforms for interaction with the customer. Concepts like an ongoing online supermodel search for an international fashion retailer, and a game-like fundraising tool for a charitable organization.

Dare to Think Different

Like I said, this may not be the model that, literally taken, works for everybody. But simply taking the old model of advertising and slapping on a new layer doesn’t work, either. That’s why people on both sides should dare to rethink their models now. The changes we see in the world around us aren’t minor. It’s a major shift. It takes a new mindset to make it work in the best possible way.

Agencies that aren’t yet fully committed to the pieces of UX design they have started to employ should think of their approach and truly define, what is the value of UXD for them? Once that’s been defined, they need to decide how to make things work so that everybody gets that value out of the process. UX designers, we need to think of how we can best give that value to the team. How do we contribute to not just user experience design, but idea generation as a whole? What is our role in advertising? How do we define it? There are many answers, not just one, and I think we should all dare to think of at least some. The first post I wrote sparked some interesting conversation – I would now like to invite you to continue it below.

Karri Ojanen