This is why people freak out about user experience design, or UxD, these days. We can define and justify and normalize everything we do during the course of a web project by referring to the user experience, and we can keep this experience in mind as a theoretical model to help us make decisions along the way.

But the user experience is only just that — a theoretical model — until you get real users. This is why we can’t begin a project with all the answers.  The answers to many important questions are provided by the users.  But the users don’t come until we’ve actually designed and built something.

Oh, the Catch-22!

The way out, of course, is by agreeing to launch with something that’s in some important way unfinished.  Knowing that our users will provide us with feedback that will shape the future site — that we plan and build the site in phases, and that these phases are informed by an ongoing engagement with the user experience.

As an agency, you need to go to great lengths to get your clients to understand this.  They can’t provide a spec, like a blueprint for a shed, and get a quote and schedule based solely on the blueprint, and then expect the actual shed to look exactly like the blueprint.  This is what they’ll want, because it’s easier to plan, and easier to budget for, and just generally easier to think about.  But it doesn’t comport with reality, so you’ll have to make a strong case for agility throughout the process.

And as a client, you need to go to equally great lengths to factor this fluidity into your own plans.  Remember the great triangle of software development: one side is budget; the second side is functionality; and the third is schedule.  You can’t fix all of these sides, because you’ll end in horrendous failure (the great triangle of pain and disappointment).  If you must, try to fix two; but leave the third one agile.

Say you’ve got a project with some fairly well-defined requirements, and pegged to a particular real-world date.  You’ve got your functionality and schedule fixed.  This means you must remain agile with your budget.  In practical terms, you’ll need to provide the agency with a budget range that is acceptable, and trust them (Trust them! Seriously!) to keep their costs down.

(Side note: if you can’t trust your agency to keep their costs down, you should find another agency.  This shouldn’t be an antagonistic process, but one where both sides share common goals.)

A second example, one that we see very often at HM: Say you’re a not-for-profit institution that secured funding for a particular project proposal from a big foundation.  You may see all three sides of the triangle as fixed: you promised a set of functionality in your proposal.  You also received a fixed amount of funding, and have a delivery date as part of the funding timeline.

In truth, though, one side of the triangle has to be flexible in this situation.  Chances are the foundation won’t increase the budget, so one of the other sides needs to be subject to change.  This may require some advocacy on your part to get the flexibility you need from the funder, but the big selling point here is the main goal: a beautiful, functional, memorable web experience that users will visit again and again because it was built around their needs.  If you can’t get it all done in the budget and timeline provided, consider this a first phase.  Phases are good!

It was an open question how best to take advantage of this community to benefit the magazine.  But instead of starting with obvious questions — Who are these users? What do they care about?  How can we increase their enthusiasm for our brand? — someone high up in the magazine’s interactive food chain had a classic technological panic. The panic took this form, probably late at night:

What about social networks?  What about Facebook?  What about Twitter?  What about blogging?  Everyone’s doing it but us!  We need to catch up.

So the magazine built a social network.  It probably hired an agency that affirmed the magazine’s fears of obsolescence and charged them an outsized fee to build every last microblog and Twitter integration, user profile, friend-manager, minifeed, video uploader, and widget that they could imagine in their darkest nightmares of media isolation.

The magazine launched their Spanking New Social Presence and, to their shock, lost all of the users who had made their old bulletin board such a lively place.

That’s how this writer I met, a young, urban, male Brooklynite, got his job: every day he logs in as five different women and maintains their ghost user profiles.  He simulates social activity on a social network that was conceived in panic, cost the magazine a good deal of increasingly scarce resources, alienated the community it was supposed to engage.

Instead of starting with open questions, this online initiative started in a panic.  And now they have a structure that requires them to lie through their teeth just to present a semblance of activity.

Don’t let this be you!  Start with the right questions about your situation, and be open to the answers that you’ll find.  For some organizations, blogging, Twitter, and a Facebook presence are just what the doctor ordered.  Those who are  lucky enough to have an existing online user base need to start with their users.  Users are the lifeblood of a participatory web.

And remember this: the structure you build brings with it a certain infrastructure, and that infrastructure must be maintained.  If you create employee blogs, you better make sure that your employees have something to say, and are trained to publish on a regular basis.  If you push your staff to sign up for Twitter, you need to make sure that they’re actively writing — and, I hope it doesn’t need to be said, that they want to write.  And if you let users create profiles and write blog entries, you need staff to review those profiles and posts on a regular basis.

An empty social network is just like bad standup comedy: nobody wants to be in the same room.  Make sure that your room, regardless of its size, makes your audience want to come back.

For many of our clients, the worth is apparent, either because of their past experience in this arena or their experience with similar creative services (advertising, brand strategy, business consulting, etc.).  It’s a relatively straightforward process to translate a strategy into a proposal and budget with clients like these.

For many other clients, though, even those with deep pockets, the web is a hard place to get a grip on.  This could be because technology scares them.  They might equate their IT budget with the kind of work that we do, because of they perceive a shared arena of activity.  Or the web to them is an infinite realm of untold, mind-boggling possibility.  Or, maybe, they’ve stumbled through every creative project they’ve ever embarked on in the past, and expect that we operate in the same fashion.

There are myriad ways to get to a common vision of the value of the work that we do.  And keep in mind that we don’t mean only us; we want to arrive at a common vision of value for our industry, not just ourselves.  We may not be the firm for you, but you’ll have a much more successful search if you can better quantify the worth of your project.

So, the “we” and “us” below don’t refer just to us at Helen Marie; we’re presumptuously speaking for the industry.

The bottom line

An easy one. You, the client, need us to do something that you estimate will affect your bottom line by X dollars in the next year.  You want to come out ahead, so obviously our work can’t cost X dollars.  But it shouldn’t be surprising for it to cost, say, half of X.  Your payment to us is fixed, but the value to you increases beyond the next year.  Our fee, then, decreases over time in relationship to the change in your bottom line.  This is math that you can do in advance of your agency search, and that will help you square your available budget against what you’re asking an agency to produce.

What it would really cost you

This often comes into play with calculations against your IT budget, because you imagine that the IT team can do work similar to ours.  Our long experience working with (and in) IT departments is that this assumption is always, always wrong.  And your IT team will be happy to disabuse you of the notion that they can magically transmogrify into a group with decades of collective web experience who can give your project the attention and focus it deserves.

If you can’t square our cost against your IT team, then what other point of reference do you have?  You can look at the job listings for web designers, web developers, information architects, and interactive project managers, and piece together the cost of bringing them on salary for a year or more.

Our experience

If you think a project is expensive, try doing it twice.  Or three times.  This happens often.  As we’ve said elsewhere on this blog, we’re often approached to redesign the client’s current site.  And the current site is often some kind of minor tragedy of wasted time and money.

We don’t guarantee that we will design and build a product that will answer all your needs for the next ten years.  What we do offer is the experience to make intelligent choices, and the opportunity to educate you on the process and help you to make informed choices.

Peace of mind

There are few experiences more relieving than finding the perfect experts for your problem.  You can’t quantify the dollar worth of that feeling.  But you can imagine paying for it.

Part of our job is to focus this enthusiasm into disciplined decisions about how best to serve a particular client and a particular project.  We have a lot of healthy arguments that start with, “Wouldn’t it be cool if…?”  The question is often followed by, “I agree, but we shouldn’t do that in this case because….”  Or, just as often: “That’s great — but let’s consider that for phase 2.”

We go through this in order to avoid three big pitfalls: building more than the client needs or can immediately use, rejecting new approaches or techniques because we’re unfamiliar, and committing to unreliable approaches or techniques because the coolness factor affects our judgment.  We wrestle with these issues so you don’t have to.

(There are a lot of interactive technologies that are the equivalent of a two-seat Lotus Exige: extremely cool, but maybe not what you need.)

You may have done your own research before you even found us, however, and decided that your new site absolutely has to include X, or be built on Y.  We often meet with potential clients who say, “We want our new site to be built on [insert trendy platform or poorly-understood technology here].”  Why, we ask? “We’ve read about it, and it looks like the best new technology for us.”

This is an ideal point to ask us what we think of the idea, and whether we have other recommendations.  That’s the beginning of a great conversation that will help you to educate yourself about your options, learn something about us and our experience, and save money in the long-haul by making the right decisions when you have the most flexibility – i.e., before you start down any road.

You’ll be able to meet the overwhelming majority of your project’s critical strategic needs with proven, industry-standard design and interface practices.  Your agency, if they’re up to snuff, will have a toolbox of information design, user interface, and technology solutions that apply in some manner to almost everything that can come up.

Your first contact with an agency should be a great learning experience.  I know that I love talking to potential and new clients about the broad strokes of planning and building a web application.  I call it Everything You Always Wanted To Know About The Web But Were Afraid To Ask.  For you, the client, it’s free advice; for us, it’s a chance to show you how we think and work.

This is a broker.  The good ones are worth their weight in gold (especially the smaller good ones).  You can get them to clear an enormous amount of brush for you — weeding out the bad listings, giving you a sales history of any property on the market, speaking the secret language of brokers with the other side.  They save you time and ultimately money.

It occurred to us at Helen Marie, after many years of working with clients of all stripes and sizes, that this is desperately needed in the design and interactive industry: a kind of creative broker.  Clients often need to commit large amounts of funding, human capital, and time to a project with an outside agency. Ironically, while this is the stage where they most need expertise, they’re often unaware of, or resistant to, the option to bring in an outside specialist right from the beginning.  We want to change this.

The hardest stage is often defining their needs to the point where they can be reflected in a clear, informative “request for proposal” (RFP).  To get to this point, a business needs to poll its stakeholders, identify their frustrations with the current system (or lack of system), look at its long-term needs, identify a budget, enunciate its brand values, and actually write the thing — and then get it approved.  This can be a full-time job (or several!).

There’s a lot riding on one of these documents.  The clarity with which you communicate your needs will directly affect the quality of the proposals you get back.  We’ve turned down many potential clients in the past because of bad RFPs — the logic being, of course, that if you can’t succinctly tell us what you need and why, then we’ll have a hard time giving you what you need.

Once the RFP is written and approved, the would-be client needs to distribute their shiny new document to the right agencies.  The world of agencies is crowded with similar offerings and slick marketing.  If you’ve never done this before, how do you tell an established, successful firm from one that talks a good game?

For instance, here are two pieces of content that you’ll find on most agency web sites.  Neither will help you determine that agency’s worth to your business.

Past Client List

There are some major clients, blue-chip brands, who occasionally hire incompetent agencies.  Even if the resulting project is a disaster, the agency in question can still legimately list that client on its site.  The big clients never have time to double-check these claims, and you, the unseasoned evaluator, will not be able to vet the association yourself without a massive expenditure of time.

Services List

An agency’s services list can look like an impressive roster of every activity you ever thought you’d need: Logo design! Hosting! Search engine optimization! Content management systems! Information architecture! It might look like a wonderland.  Truth is, though, that each one of these services requires at least one seasoned, communicative, well-managed specialist on the other side in order to be of any worth to you. Too often, the services list is meant to be scanned as a laundry list, not vetted.  The agency knows that its site’s audience includes harried executive assistants, product managers, and not-for-profit executive directors who are desperately trying to find the right agency that fits all their needs.  The temptation is to provide an omnibus list of services so a potential client can glance at the list and think, “Oh, phew — they do everything we need.”

On the other hand, an agency might not list a service if it assumes that service as part of another.  For instance, the agency might be skilled at print design and print pre-production, but may list only “design” among its services.  Or it may assume that database administration and web server optimization are assumed when it says “systems administration”.  It’s hard, and it shouldn’t be your job, to tease out these services when you have better things to do with your life.

Helen Marie is not just interested in shepharding work into our own office.  We’re interested in working with clients to help them through the process of defining and enunciating their needs, and finding the right agency to fulfill those needs.  We can identify where to spend money and where to save it, how to conceive your interactive project in phases to ease funding commitments and provide for more flexibility, how to use the language of the industry in your RFP to maximize the quality of the resulting proposals, and what kinds of agencies to target.  We can save you time and money, and ease the strain on your organization.

Call it what you want — creative broker, strategic design consultant, interactive strategist, you name it.  We thought of “institutional heartbreak avoider”, but it was too dramatic.  We’re sticking with “creative broker” for now.

In any case, your (limited, possibly anecdotal) understanding of this person’s skills may lead you to think, “I don’t need an overpriced agency to design and build our site.  We’ll just get him to do it.  We know him, we trust him, we already pay him….”  You might also think, “Let’s keep the risk low this first time around by keeping the investment low.  If we need to, we can hire specialists to clean this up later.”

This person, your guy, who undoubtedly has skills in some area or other, will not deliver the web site that you need.  Your unfamiliarity with the interactive world may cause you to equate your guy’s technical skills with a total knowledge of the process of web design and development, but in reality you’ve hired an electrician to design and build a house.

The “I know a guy” phenomenon is an outgrowth of what we call Technological Panic.  You are pressured, either by the higher-ups at your organization or by market forces, to produce a web site.  And your lifelong experience of the web is either of maintaining whatever crusty, old thing you have now, or even just of consuming the web through a browser.

You need to be in control of this project, but you can’t sense the boundaries or the requirements.  It’s hard even just to write the first steps down on a piece of paper.  This is the source of Technological Panic: a total, fundamental unfamiliarity with the subject.

For years, Helen Marie’s business was largely based on clients who approached us after succumbing to Technological Panic.  We were the Second Try.  The organization would approach us after completing the first site, which would barely see the light of day before becoming a symbolic container for every aspect of the company’s internal politics or strategic confusion.  Finally, someone would say, “We need to do this right, and we need to put real money into this project — what we have is useless.”  That person would find us.

Clients who come to us in this state are humbled by their initial experience.  They have realized, painfully, that the electrician they hired didn’t build them a house, but instead tried to frame the building from wires and electrical tape.  As it turns out, the place to start is with an architecture firm.  We enjoy working with these clients because they don’t need us to make the case for proper strategy, planning, research, and information architecture.  But we think there’s a lot of unnecessary pain out there in Client Land, and we’d like to warn you ahead of time.

Conclusion: to overcome Technological Panic, call us, or an agency like ours, to talk through your situation.  Call more than one agency.  You’ll find that these conversations can give you a sense of the real learning curve, and put you on the path to ascending it.  Panic subsides, the real learning begins, and you can come up with a plan that’s grounded in reality.