UX Trends Come and Go Every Year, but Good Consulting Is a Constant

The Death of Web Design

This predicted trend is about how we need to get beyond design patterns and into the uncharted territories of product design within a holistic ecosystem of products or applications and their overall user journeys.

We’ve already accomplished a lot of the easy work with design patterns. Recreating new versions of things like shopping carts and checkout processes offers little value. But there are larger issues to solve like connecting all of an enterprise’s product offerings or designing an omnichannel user experience that lets someone move seamlessly from wearable, to mobile, to car, to home without skipping a beat. These are the types of challenges that make UX designers’ blood pump these days—and these are the challenges that drive companies’ need for UX consultants.

Many companies currently design their offerings for specific channels, within a somewhat siloed organization. So bringing someone in from the outside to help an organization look at everything holistically is exactly the sweet spot for a UX consultant.

When Good Is Not Good Enough

Whenever an organization tries to go from good to great, they need assistance. Design consultancies are currently being snapped up by larger, mainstream consulting firms, as well as by companies that are looking to differentiate themselves. Capital One’s acquisition of Adaptive Path is a great example of a company’s knowing what it would take to progress from good to great, but needing help getting there. They had been contracting with Adaptive Path for years and knew that this group was the right partner to help them achieve greatness.

The Constancy of Consulting

Regardless of whether these trends become reality in 2015, the basics of what consulting is all about do not change:

• being authentic
• relationship building

If we look at the example of Adaptive Path and Capital One in greater depth, we can quickly see that these two characteristics of consulting were in full play. First and foremost, Adaptive Path was authentic with Capital One. During their initial relationship, they did not just tell Capital One what they wanted to hear, they told them what they needed to hear to be successful. Furthermore, they did so in a way that made the relationship stronger, without sacrificing what Adaptive Path did well or wanted to be as a company.

No matter what type of UX consulting you do, the need to be authentic is always there. Some inexperienced consultants might fall short of this goal and let a common caricature of a consultant determine how they conduct themselves: a person who would lie and say anything to convince someone to buy his or her services. But experienced consultants know that this way of behaving is only for short-timers. If you want to be a successful consultant who not only has leverage with your clients, but their trust and commitment, you must always be up front about your experience and authentic in what you communicate to a client, even if that means having a difficult conversation.

As UX professionals, we know that users can perceive when they are being shortchanged by a design or an interaction. The same holds true for our clients. Trying to convince potential clients that you and your services are everything they need often has the opposite of the desired effect. Clients can tell when you are being overly clever or laying it on too thick. Authenticity is always the best approach.

In everything you do as a consultant, you should always keep the growth and maintenance of your client relationships in mind. Every interaction you have with your clients has the potential to change the relationship for better or worse. When you’re authentic in all of your dealings with clients, this may not always enable you to establish or improve your relationships with them. However, savvy UX consultants know that, when they’re honest in communicating what a business needs, but the business does not respond positively to their guidance, it is likely not a business they would want to work with.