In the booming IT economy, usability professionals have never been in as great a demand as now. Almost everyday, we hear of one company or the other trying to build their own usability and user experience teams. Does this situation spell doom for independent User Experience Consulting companies? Are these becoming redundant? Lets try to find out…

When we mention an IT entity, it could mean one of the three types:

• A company engaging in IT consulting
• The IT division of a non-IT company
• An IT Product company

The first case is easily addressed – an in-house design team is a must. these companies may start usability consulting with external people and should get their help to build their own, but in the end, it is almost always a better strategy to have their own usability setup for these companies.

In the second case, usability requiements are infrequent and external consultants can easily satisfy the occasional needs that arise.

The third case is more complex. To start with, an in-house UXD (User eXperience Design) team in a product company is close to the product and understands the product inside-out(has a deep understanding of the product). Sometimes the functionality of the product is so complex that it takes external consultants weeks if not months, just to understand the domain and the product. Due to this, in internal team can easily contribute meaningfully in a continuous improvement scenario, in companies embracing the spiral development and extreme programming methods.

The team knows how the product evolved, the technology, the interface legacy (why the interface is the way it is…), hence it is easy for them to evaluate design options against other parameters(technology, marketing, etc.) and choose the most appropriate. This equips the team well to design quick ‘just in time’ solutions, something that an external consultant can’t possibly even think of. In the event of external consultants involvement, direct, evaluate and guide the external consultants efforts about design features, due to their superior knowledge of the product.

To implement a change, it is important to get a buy-in from other stakeholders in a company. The internal UXD team understands the these dynamics well and is in a great position to get these changes implemented. (This may sound political, but it is inevitable in almost every organization). The team can thus meaningfully contribute to the product planning and feature prioritizing process.

However these advantages turn into disadvantages in other ways:

• An in-house design team is often constrained by lack of lateral exposure to design, something that design consultants have lots of.
• May get bogged down by the knowledge of interface legacy, that may hamper innovative, off-beat solutions.
• Are so involved in the day-to-day firefighting that is required of them, that they may miss the strategic 20000 feet view of the product landscape.
• May be emotionally involved with the existing interface so that it becomes difficult to look at it objectively.
• May be tied down due to the organizational bureaucracy and politics, that stops them from challenging the status quo of the User Experience.

This is where the UXD consulting companies step in. They have a breadth of consulting experience that they can draw upon, to look at relevant alternatives that may have been tried in another context. They do not have past baggage about the product and can easily look at the product with a fresh perspective, which is why they have a better chance of coming up with innovative solutions.

Internal bureaucracy and politics about product development direction rarely affects them directly, so they can suggest bold changes to the product and interface strategy.

They also have a better strategic overview of the product so are in a position to make better strategic suggestions.

However the ideas have to be refined, modified and executed by the in-house team since external consultants neither have the requisite bandwidth nor sometimes the in-depth knowledge of the product to do so.

It is also difficult for consultants to support the client at a moment’s notice for changes and additions in the extreme programming scenario for the same reasons.

An optimum approach then, is to involve both, the in-house team external consultants at appropriate junctures to get the best of both worlds. An internal UX team can lead the effort to keep the product interface updated in course of continuous development.

However, a product UI quality slowly erodes after continuous upgrades and feature loading on the product, and needs to be scrubbed from time to time. At the time of major revisions then, it is a good idea to involve consultants to redesign the interface. The internal team at this point can guide the redesign effort, by giving the consultants timely and valuable feedback and provide them with knowledge about the product or the domain that they sorely need, but may lack.

To conclude the article, quoting from “Built to Last” by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras, let us shun the tyranny of “OR” and embrace the genius of “AND”. It’s not in-house teams OR external consultants – it’s both.

This article was originally published on 14 Nov 2007. Above is a reprint of the same.