The amount of design work companies need to undertake has been on the rise in the last years, especially in order to create a better experience for their customers and their employees.
This progress not only created a huge amount of new design work in the marketplace but also led to a distinction between working as a designer for a design consultancy (agency) versus, working as a designer internally in a corporate setting.
These two distinct design roles represent two faces of the same craft, co-existing in the business world.
Obviously, each of these roles have its own ups & downs, but I’d like to point out some possible pains of a design consultant, which are usually overlooked in the designer community.
1) Losing control after design
As design consultants, we are great at designing the products & services to the point that they are ready for development to go to market, but we lose control when we finally deliver our design outputs.
It’s not rare that things go wrong in the development phase, or businesses make decisions contradicting the philosophy of the initial design. All these can work against the product when it finally gets to the market, but while these changes happen, as a consultant you are already working on another project, and you have a very limited remaining influence on your precious work.
2) Not being able to make product decisions for a living product
Even if everything works great in development aligned with what you had designed, as a consultant, you have very limited information about how your designs are performing in the real world.
What worked perfectly in all user tests & prototypes may not work as expected in the real world, it’s rare that you’re still on the table at that point to make decisions for iterations or pivots.
Without facing those real world situations, it’s hard to get the opportunity to learn from how your product performs in the real world, missing the opportunity to look back & reflect on your design decisions.
3) Limited chance to experiment
Since design consultants are usually assigned to the most important projects a company has, usually they find themselves in projects with high budgets, limited timelines & already set milestones. In this type of projects It’s expected to be on track in terms of time, scope & outcomes at all times.
When you think from the design team’s perspective, this can easily create en environment with the need to come up with the most viable solutions, in the least amount of time, where risk is not very welcome, and a sense of success is necessary even in the shortest term relationships with clients.
Unless experimenting is a goal of the project that’s set & agreed from the beginning, it’s hard to navigate the client to this mindset during the project that has its big expectations in place.
4) Few chances to go wild
This is a natural follower of the previous one: Without the chance of experimenting, and in an environment where risk-taking is not very welcome: It’s harder to go to the extreme ends of your craft, keeping everyone closer to the safe zone. The solutions that come up can still be of very high quality and clients can still be happy. However with limited risk-taking, it’s usual to lean towards what had previously been proven to be working.
The most adventurous projects either come from some really brave clients who are up to taking risks, or projects that aim to experiment from the beginning.
In my view, the outcome of this is that we almost never create unsuccessful services; but we may be missing groundbreaking and revolutionary work possibilities as well.
5) Being Dependent
Talking about ground-breaking work, sometimes we believe we have something that’s a very strong candidate for turning around the company or disrupting an industry. Even in these cases, you have to rely on the client’s buy-in of these ideas, them being up to the challenge and their willingness to take the risks.
Not being the final decision maker is something you get used to as a consultant, but it can still hurt when the company had decided they cannot take forward something you strongly believe in.
The other possibility is that the client may believe in the idea, but they don’t have the capability or capacity in place or the investment they need to implement it.
In summary, there’re various ways you can feel the pain of being dependent. Success is ultimately determined by the perceived value of the client. On the other hand, being dependent is something inevitable in almost all cases, even in your own company: You’ll have some constraints you’ll have to depend on and people you’ll need to convince.
6) Repetition
As a consultant, it’s usually an advantage to work on varying types of projects with different clients, but the downside is that you start coming across with similar ideas and trends over and over again in different projects.
In the digital world, there’s a tendency to follow the same trends or use the same new technologies to keep up with the race, which makes recurrence a reality for everyone. From the consultant’s point of view, this may create a sense of repetition and a feeling of not being able to move forward, as you may find yourself discussing an idea you discussed previously with another client.
The other outcome of this is that you need a strong sense of ethics & an awareness that each business context is different, and there’s no single truth. Something that had not worked for one of your clients may be a good solution for another one, and it’s important to keep an open eye on every idea, even it is too familiar.
7) Becoming a Design Advisor, and Losing the Touch with the Craft
Lastly, as a design consultant part of your job is to give strategic & technical advice to the company, and the other part is to create the required artefacts. With time, and as you gain seniority, your role may become more about giving advice, and less about applying your craft.
The other thing that could happen is that while you use some of your skills in your daily work, there may be advancements in your craft that you’re not catching up with or you may lose some skills you don’t find enough chance to utilise.
So, an important thing to be aware of as a design consultant is keeping your skills fresh & relevant even if that means extra effort outside of your daily work.
All these points that I mentioned are not to put a shade on the advantages of being a design consultant. There are great parts of that job, such as: The variety of projects you’re working for, the variety of clients you meet and industries you get to know, the learning opportunities from different people & teams, and being able to discover different areas of your craft.
Here are some advice to lessen the pain these points can make and have a better experience working as a design consultant.
- Keep in touch after design delivery. Most times, after projects end, both the client & the design team goes on their ways, but it’s a good idea to decide on a way to keep the connection, for both parties to come back with critical help needs, or regular updates. This will be an easy way to keep in track of how the development of the design work is going. And this channel may create the chance to make important touches on critical decisions to be made.
- Create ways to stay in the loop to learn about how your product performs in the market. In Fjord, we have an initiative about this called “Design Intelligence” where we try to design what will be the important metrics to look at & make decisions based on when our product or service is in the market. This is a way to come back and discuss about how our project perform when they go live.
- Facilitate an environment where everyone can share their ambitions. It’s a good idea to have a discussion (ideally in the beginning of a project) for everyone to share their personal ambitions of the project. This shouldn’t be a discussion where only the client shares their expectations, but where both the client & design team can share what they want to achieve with the project on a personal & team level.
- Push your clients further. Clients have a tendency to take the safest & most beneficial road with a short-term thinking. As designers, it’s usually our duty to push them for more long-term thinking, taking more risk, and being more customer-centric to foresee benefits that are not low-hanging.
- Mind the gap companies may have. When companies are trying to bring our ideas to life they may have various barriers we cannot foresee as designers. This doesn’t have to a matter of budget but can come in different shapes such as lack of required skills, capacity of teams, things not working well in the company in terms of culture or communication. In Fjord we have a work stream called Living businesses which tries to address the different gaps companies may have that block them from reaching their goals. When we work on a Living Business projects, we try to detect those barriers, and suggest ways to overcome those.
- Start with an open mind for every project. Every client & project are different. Even when you feel your project is very similar to a previous one, and you need to work on that same service again, the team, the brand, the client changes everything, and it can create a completely different challenge opposing your expectations.
- Keep up with what’s happening outside. It’s easy to fall into the trap of spending your work days, meeting the expectations about your current project, but as a designer or someone in the tech industry, it’s required to keep up to date with all advancements happening outside, in order to keep your skills relevant for the future. Many jobs, tools & expertise areas didn’t exist a short while ago, and the same will happen in the upcoming future for sure.
I believe to stay real & relevant in the marketplace, design consulting companies will need to pay attention to these ideas; and acknowledge that their capabilities may be questioned more & more as corporate design teams get better & better at designing and they can question consultancies that they never really own products for real, and they don’t know what it takes to make a product successful in the market.
And on a personal level, I think design consultants must be aware of these drawbacks in order to address them based on their personal preferences and the direction they’d like to take in their careers.
Please share your ideas & comments or if you’d like to add some points to this discussion.