The most important context of user experience design is consumer mindset.

Before we start pushing pixels around, we should be working hard to understand consumer wants and needs. Gathering insights into their emotional desires is critical to creating an experience, throughout the entire customer journey, that in both subtle and direct ways will reinforce your brand’s ability to help fulfill their desire.

These learnings can inform all design in both form and content to help deliver effective consumer engagement.

Once prototypes are developed, conducting user experience research, including eye tracking, allow refinements to be made that work to optimize the user experience right down to the micro interaction level.

Creators need to find the right balance between being engaging-entertaining while also being honest about the fact that the entire purpose is to facilitate the customers acquisition of the product or service.

User experience can also be thought of as utility.

The utility of the user experience, as a lens through which to view the entire customer journey, offers designers the opportunity to apply their talents to enhance the performance of the entire team.

Understanding and tracking the entire customer journey is essential to a successful engagement. The fractured media environment today demands simple brand ideas that are delivered simply and always in context of consumer desires. When user experience design diverges from the brand idea, it is no longer doing its job well. There are often opportunities to chase trends and implement ideas, methods, and tactics that may create a short-term boost in sales, but at the same time are weakening the brand.

In the long run, a great, well-executed, brand idea will outperform clever transactional tactics. It takes a strong idea and the willpower to resist the temptation of short-term thinking to build a strong and enduring brand.

To connect the dots, the customer experience journey is an obligation to the brand idea and strong brands are anchored in the mindset of consumer desire.

According to American labor leaders and pioneers, Labor Day celebrates the everyday men and women who work to create “all the grandeur we behold.”

Created as a holiday to celebrate the laboring classes, it honors workers and workers’ rights, like paid sick days, 40-hour workweek and fair working conditions, as well as their contributions to “America’s strength, prosperity and well-being.” GH 

I wonder how the founders of the labor movement would react to the working hours of agency labor?

It’s a business that knows no bounds when it comes to encroaching on quality of life. 

But if you love it, well, such is your life; a labor of love. 

As a business owner, leader or manager in a creative enterprise, utilization of labor is an invaluable tool in accounting the efficiency and financial success of a business. Or is it? 

Utilization in the commercial creative world is a problematic measurement because try as we might to straight-line the process, it is anything but. To the uninitiated staring at a utilization report, it will appear as if efficiency gains should be easy to achieve. Sometimes it really is that easy. Most of the time it’s not. 

While some jobs are task-based and easier to measure, those roles involved in generating strategy and creative work are extremely hard to pin down because creating great work is rarely straight-line. The hours involved are never truly captured and as a result, a false economy is at work. 

Utilization in this context is a blunt instrument and should not be the sole arbiter of performance. Sadly, it has become the hammer that pounds the nails. 

There are two ways to maximize utilization: produce and sell work of such value that you never want for a client or sell the full utilization of your services by taking on just about any work at all. Commercial creative organizations immediately step on a slippery slope when they start taking on work to fill utilization. 

This often happens with a strong sense of benevolence and desire to keep people employed in the face of a downturn in business. Fair enough, but it’s a short-money game that undermines the future of the enterprise if not kept in check.

Because clients are willing to pay only so much for work, it’s a rare day when all the hours involved are actually paid in full. Often, they are not even recorded. Agency personnel learn quickly that they need to bring the work in on estimate.  

The estimate is a negotiation of value between the client and agency. Thus, utilization is an attempt to quantify efficiency relative to the agreed value. It’s also, too often, a denial of real cost. 

Utilization reports that appear to show capacity are sometimes pure fiction that suggest more capacity than actually exists. In fact, most agency staffers are entirely overworked and underperforming because they lack adequate time to recharge. 

Management often turns a blind eye to unbilled hours knowing that if they report these hours, their superiors will be forced to confront the client or open a Pandora’s box of internal issues. 

Maybe the project is over hours because the fee was negotiated incorrectly, the client is a hot mess, or the agency cannot get out of its own way. Regardless of the cause, it’s a rare client who will agree to pay more. 

The true cost: talent flight and the long-term viability of the enterprise. 

Now, let’s go utilize our beach chairs and put our feet up on this, the 140^th anniversary of Labor Day, and celebrate some well-deserved rest.