Agencies - design for your market, not your designers. or Promotions need UCD love too

• We don't have time
• It makes sense to me
• The designer just did it with the project manager giving them the brief from the client
• The client likes it

Digital agencies promise the client a quick fast results - and often skip validation and to known interaction design or usability standards in lieu of quick, attractive results.

That's fine when your designer is working for an audience just like them, as they will make something people like them will use. The client, either not tech savvy or unaware will not question the usefulness or effectiveness of the design, often just signing off on the nice looking end result in an office on a projector. They are often too scared of sounding ignorant or have no awareness of usability and interaction design accepting that it looks great, trusting the agency.

Sanitarium trusted an agency to do a promotion for Kids and had to go back to the drawing board on a recent internet promotion as it was too hard to use (see article).

Conducting quick usability testing with the target market: Kids, would have intercepted this issue, stopped the bad publicity, and made a fun, usable promotion that still would have been on brand and attractive. Given the negative attention this caused Sanitarium, is usability testing and user centered design an overhead now? Part of that 1.3 million dollar campaign budget could have and should have gone into a few extra hours of review and validation.

Budget and time are the most common excuses that agencies have to skip user centered design steps or usability activities.

Usability testing, as the usability practitioner in the article link recommends, is vital. However by this stage, the design is in a form that stakeholders and designer may be attached to, which politically makes it very hard to change.

Good usability and interaction design should also be built in at the formative stages of a promotion or design. Usability testing then works as insurance validating the design.

Agencies can still deliver fast and effectively and still do usability activities quickly: here are a few tips:

• Profile the target markets cababilities (kids are a classic case: different motor and cognitive skills than an adult let alone a designer)
• Work within usabilty and interaction design standards (e.g. if a model or metaphor isn't broken don't fix it). These don't stifle the creativity of 'designers' no matter what they say
• Conduct initial sketches or just review a working version with a user centered design practitioner. Walkthroughs that pick up issues can be done easily by sitting down with the designer and changing things on the spot. (either at the whiteboard or at the screen)
• Train and educate visual designers in interaction and usability design principles (A good effective design can be true to their 'vision' still)
• Test with your target market as the quoted usability practioner recommends in the article link (especially your audience is very different from the people who build your promotions).

Time and time again digital agencies see usability and user centered design as an overhead, too formal and scale back investment in user centered design in times of economic downturn. Gems like this prove that UCD has a place even in fast paced agencies and leaving things to rock star visual designers who know flash and other web design tools is a big risk. 'agencies' and clients alike take note (and stipulate that the site/promo be validated with your market).