By my calculations I've been a part of Mad*Pow for 6 months now. Prior to joining the crew here, I was an in-house ("innie") user experience designer for a large financial services company.
/From-Innie-to-Outie--Pardon-Me-While-I-Navel-Gaze/IMG_0006-(2).jpg.aspx)
Part of what attracted me to Mad*Pow was the opportunity to get away from the in-house mode of operation I had grown accustomed to over my 8+ years with my former employer. Now that I've been a consultant ("outie") for a little while, I thought I'd look back at what I thought the change would mean and compare my expectations to reality.
That Grass Over There Sure Looks Greener
In my previous position, I was a part of a small, five person User Experience team. The company itself was just starting to understand the concepts of user experience design, and as such, much of our time as a team was spent educating stakeholders, promoting our services and trying to insert ourselves into projects. We constantly felt like we had to justify ourselves, even on the projects we were already working on. It was tiring to say the least.
It's probably obvious to you, and most likely should have been to me, that the expectation that I wouldn't have to promote or educate on the topic of experience design as much by becoming a consultant, is ludicrous. But in my head I figured, clients had already come to Mad*Pow for their services, there would be no need for all the justification and promotion I was used to.
The opposite is true. It's more important than ever that I talk about UX Design, what it is, how it works, and how driving the creation and design of products based on the experiences they are intended to evoke in individuals and audiences leads, in the end, to better products.
It's important I do this, because it affords more opportunities for Mad*Pow, and my teammates and my own livelihood are directly tied to those opportunities. Being an innie provided a kind of certainty or stability so that, even in hard times like the recent economic downturn, I never felt like my livelihood was dependent on my ability to introduce people to the ideas in user experience.
Another big appeal, was the opportunity to work with clients from a variety of industries. I found the Financial Services industry to be interesting and I learned a lot. However, I longed to work in other industries, with the expectation that different industries would mean different kinds of projects.
I got my wish. Within my first month at Mad*Pow I was pulled into projects for clients in sports and entertainment, health, marketing and yes, financial services. What I learned as I became more involved with projects though, is that most of the problems and goals clients from these other industries have are the same as ones I worked on as an innie, just with subtle differences.
These differences, despite their subtlety, prompt me to immerse myself and learn more about each industry, it's history and it's place in society and culture. What i learn from this immersion provides new insights and ideas for approaching problems.
Third, and perhaps my biggest hope in making the transition to consultant, was a desire to have a way to break away from projects and ideas.
As a designer, innie or outie, your identity is somewhat tied to the company you work for. But when you're an innie, the things produced by the projects you work on are tied to that same company, and by extension, you. Companies are known and identified by what they produce. When you tell someone you're a designer for a company, they most likely immediately associate you with the products they know from that company.
This, of course, can be a good thing. Who wouldn't want to be identified with a successful product. But it has a downside as well. Not all products succeed. And success or failure, the inability to break away from past works and ideas can, by both internal and external means, have a stagnating effect on one's ability to generate new ideas and move forward.
Being a consultant you are, in a way, forced to let go of ideas and past works. You and the company you work for are not first and foremost associated with the products you helped design, your client is.
So far, this has proven to be freeing for me. In the short time I've been with Mad*Pow, I've found myself finally acting on ideas I'd long held onto untouched in the back of notebooks, letting go of ideas all together and generating more new ideas than I have in a long time. I've come to believe that holding on to ideas is one of the worst things someone can do. Either act on them yourself or, if you can't, share them so that someone else can act on them.
One of the Best Decisions I've Ever Made
So yes, the shift from innie to outie didn't match my expectations exactly. But overall, I do feel that this is a better fit for me.
And my decision to join Mad*Pow was only partially based on the desire to make that transition. More important to me was that I had found a place where I felt I belonged, where I would get to work with people I respect and admire, be given ample opportunity to try new things, succeed, fail, learn and grow, and most importantly, have fun.