Participants:
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- Cristie Schrader, Senior UX Designer @UpTop
- Michael Woo, Head of Design @UpTop
Length: 1m 53s
Michael Woo:
In what ways can an external perspective bring fresh insights to the client’s organization?
Cristie Schrader:
Well, I think simply the fact that I’m not an employee, I’m not bogged down by company culture and infrastructure, it kind of allows me more freedom of exploration. That might sound abstract, but I think when you’re at a company for a long time doing the same thing, you can get a little jaded. I don’t really have any preconceived notions coming into this. My skin in the game is simply different than what an employee’s would be. Also, because I’m not limited to the silos of work that an in-house designer might get trapped in, I don’t really experience disenchantment. The variety of work keeps things interesting and it can help spark new ideas that I can bring to our clients.
Michael Woo:
I know as an organization it can be a difficult decision on whether to hire within or hire externally. Often what we hear is it can be too expensive to build up an internal design team because it requires a lot of work to do. So I want to touch on some additional things that an outside perspective brings. There’s a saying that Craig uses all the time, which is you can’t read the label from inside the jar, which basically means you can’t identify or solve your own problems because you’re just way too close to them. We’ve heard this a lot from clients, which is that their in-house designers are good at what they do, but they are only good at working incrementally and when you need to reimagine an experience, they don’t have those capabilities along those same lines. Using an agency to reimagine an experience allows them to draw upon their cross-industry exposure and learnings.
For more information, watch the entire podcast which includes the clip above.
