While running an agency, you get used to losing pitches and realize that sometimes you\u2019re just not the right fit for that potential client \u2014 that\u2019s ok. Not everyone is going to agree with your team\u2019s point of view and developing a bitterness about that isn\u2019t worth the effort. Recently, however, I\u2019ve noticed a trend that is frustrating and more than a little insulting to the type of work we do.<\/p>\n
In the past few weeks we lost two pitches for the wrong reasons. In both cases, the potential client has praised our design and UX work, said outright that we were the best company to do the job, and walked out of our initial pitch with the idea of a contract being merely a formality. Then in both of these cases, the decision-maker eventually got back to us with a sincere apology (which rarely happens when you lose a job), explaining that they weren\u2019t going with us because our team wasn\u2019t the target audience<\/em> and therefore couldn\u2019t possibly design the experience for them.<\/p>\n Hearing that not once but twice in such a short period of time got me thinking \u2014 not only about how ignorant that philosophy is, but how narrow-minded and dangerous it is. The best solutions are found by truly understanding the audience, their frustrations, their needs and what else they are doing outside of your product, not by being the customer yourself. To take it a step further, by identifying yourself as the customer, you may actually be boxing yourself in to a place where you\u2019re preventing creativity and real solution-oriented thinking.<\/p>\n The job of a user experience professional is to create experiences for a myriad of audiences, and it\u2019s through a solid, proven process of research and analysis that we are able to do this. Even if you are the customer, the awareness you have of your own frustrations, needs, and fallbacks is generally extremely slim. Often, it\u2019s the reading between the lines and observing patterns in behavior that speak more loudly in research than conversations themselves.<\/p>\n Additionally, the most successful teams understand that the work you\u2019ve done outside of a particular topic, industry or vertical can be just as valuable as the experience or knowledge you have within it.<\/p>\n The greatest flaw in believing your users can create the best experiences is that it breaks one of the cardinal rules of UX: believing that people want to use a product the same way you do. As soon as you paint yourself into that corner, you\u2019re almost assuredly doomed to fail.<\/strong><\/p>\n Finally, when it comes down to it, the best experience designers you’ll work with have been designing experiences for audiences other than themselves for the majority of their careers. They wouldn\u2019t have found success if they weren\u2019t doing that.<\/p>\n In the end, there are plenty of reasons not to hire an agency, whether it be a personality fit, budget, timeline, location, etc. Our role as experience designers is to complement the specific industry knowledge that our clients have and to challenge it from a new perspective in order to create the best product possible. If we had to be the users for every project we took on, our client roster would be pretty much nil.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" While running an agency, you get used to losing pitches and realize that sometimes you\u2019re just not the right fit for that potential client \u2014 that\u2019s ok. Not everyone is going to agree with your team\u2019s point of view and developing a bitterness about that isn\u2019t worth the effort. Recently, however, I\u2019ve noticed a trend […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":928,"featured_media":34106,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[43902],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5873","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-professional-development"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nNarrow-minded and dangerous<\/h3>\n