I received a rejection email the other day from a man who had interviewed me for a job. I haven’t been rejected many times in my interview history, and I don’t think I’ve ever received a rejection email. So I find myself reflecting on it. I’m not sure if any further action on my part is expected, required, appropriate. Do I thank him for considering me?

It was a strange interview. A phone call. I don’t like interviewing over the phone. I feel handicapped without the social cues that come with face-to-face interaction. Also, I was sitting outside our midwife’s office (my wife was inside – we’re expecting our first baby), so the setting was not ideal for focus.

So I was unfocused, but not just because of the setting. I was complacent. I’m content with my work situation right now, so I don’t need a job. I approached the interview with the attitude that he needed to convince me, not the other way around. I suppose I was a little bit cocky. I expected him to be convinced already, and to offer me the job (eventually). The wrong attitude.

Also, he started the interview – a 30-minute phone call – by asking if I had any questions for him. This threw me a bit. Wasn’t I the one being interviewed? Shouldn’t he be asking me questions? When he finished answering my first question, he asked me, “what else?”

Eventually he asked me something – his only question during the entire call, as it turned out. It was a good one. To paraphrase: “Tell me about your experiences evangelizing user experience within an organization. How would you go about doing that?”

My answer was terrible. I rambled on about the importance of diplomacy and challenges around organizational politics (although I didn’t use those terms). I do think diplomacy and organizational politics factor in to the process of evangelizing user experience, but they’re hardly the most important considerations. It’s not the resonant or inspiring stuff.

I’ve worked hard to evangelize user experience in several organizations, through a variety of challenges and obstacles, so I’m disappointed in my answer. If I’d had more time to think about it, I would have started with the ‘why’ of it.

I believe I’m in the delight business. That’s the real goal of user experience design. Engineers can get on board with this idea as much as anyone. Who wouldn’t want to be in the delight business? I’ve helped engineers get excited about delighting customers. I’ve encouraged them to be a little competitive about it even.

Next I would have talked about science. User experience isn’t touchy-feely. It isn’t based on some designer’s intuition. You might start there, but there are lots of robust tools and processes for testing and validating. Quantifying success. Demonstrating objectively that A is better than B.

Finally, I might have talked about diplomacy, but I would have talked about how I would lead the conversation. It’s important to get engineers to talk about what’s working, what they’re good at, what’s going well. A lot of engineers are good designers, and it’s much more important to rally around what’s great than to identify the problems.

Ultimately, I don’t think it was the right job for me. The company is interesting, even important. But I don’t have enough of a connection to their industry or market. Still, I wish I’d put my best foot forward.

Not to make excuses, but a 30-minute phone call isn’t hospitable to best feet. When I interview people, I send them my most important questions in advance. I usually give candidates an assignment as well. Otherwise I’m only seeing their improv skills, their ability to think on their feet. This is an important skill for sure, but not the cardinal one.

Spotify has arrived in the US! Twitter was all abuzz when the announcement came, and lots of my friends jumped on board as soon as they could scrounge up invites. I was excited to sign up too, but then I procrastinated. And then procrastinated some more.

For one thing, I have a pretty big collection of music I’ve purchased over the years, and when you consider that, say, 500 years ago, many people on the planet had the opportunity to listen to music only a few times during their lives, maybe I should just be satisfied with what I already have. But it seems I’m not, because in addition to my own music collection, I use Pandora, and I subscribe to eMusic.

I like the “lean-back” experience of Pandora. I don’t have to make many decisions, and it often introduces me to great new music – which I then add to my wish list on eMusic.

That’s where the problem starts for me.

My eMusic wish list has become absurdly huge, and for $11.99 a month I can download about three albums (which is much better than iTunes or Amazon). The problem is, I’ve come to dread my “refresh” date, because I know I’ll be overwhelmed not only by what’s already in my wish list, but what’s available to me in the rest of the eMusic catalog. More than once I’ve left without downloading anything, telling myself I’ll come back when I feel more inspired or when I have more time to browse. More than once I’ve failed to come back, forfeiting my monthly fee (until recently, the policy was use it or lose it).

Based on my experience with eMusic, I hesitate to sign up for yet more music to choose from. But the problem is not just about choosing what to listen to; there’s also the problem of choosing which music service to sign up for.

There’s Spotify now, but there are also Spotify’s competitors – most notably Rdio and Grooveshark, but also Rhapsody, the old incumbent, Last.fm, and many more. I’ve read five or six blog posts comparing these services to each other, and honestly I still feel like I don’t know what the differences are, or what makes any one of them better than the others.

I think it boils down to this: People prefer Rdio’s UI (especially the mobile app). Spotify has a (slightly?) bigger selection (and better sharing features?). Grooveshark, as a crowdsourced service, suffers from inconsistent song naming and questionable licensing (the latter of which puts them at risk of being shut down). Also, they don’t have a mobile app. Last.fm and Rhapsody are fine services that just have the misfortune of being yesterday’s news.

This of course is a uniquely first-world problem, which lies in the psychological realm of what is lately being called “The Paradox of Choice.” Psychologist Barry Schwartz, author of the book bearing this title breaks it down into several sub-problems – two of which are relevant here:

• Choice and Happiness – Basically an over-abundance of choice leads to depression. One study showed, for example, that people at chocolate-tasting events enjoyed themselves much more when they were given a smaller selection of chocolates to choose from.
• Missed Opportunities - I know I’m not going to pay for eMusic, Spotify and Rdio, but I resist committing to any of them because I’m afraid of what I’ll forever miss from the others.

This all reminds me of the first time I saw one of those Internet-connected digital jukeboxes in a bar – the ones that will fetch almost any song you can think of. I was waiting my turn behind a guy who’d just put his money in it, and he was taking forever. Come on come on come on, I was saying in my head, until he finally finished making his picks. Then it was my turn, and I was completely flummoxed. Eventually I think I gave up.

There’s a bar in San Francisco called Lucky 13 that’s famous for its jukebox. It’s a wonderfully-curated selection of great punk music, plus a few all-time classics and a nod to pop. It’s easy to choose a great set in the Lucky 13 jukebox.

Carefully considered limits can be a good thing.

Here’s what I’m gonna do. I’m going to cancel my eMusic, because choosing three albums a month out of their massive catalog is the most acute problem in this mix. Then, I’m going to sign up for Rdio, not because I’m certain it’s better than Spotify, but because my friend Marisol works there.

James Dyson was not happy with his vacuum cleaner. It wasn’t powerful enough, and he determined that the problem was the bag. The bag’s purpose was to catch the dirt, but as it filled up, it quickly compromised the suction. So he set out to create a bagless vacuum cleaner, and through much trial and error (5,271 prototypes according to some sources), James Dyson came up with something he called “dual cyclone” technology. His design used centrifugal force instead of a bag to separate dirt from the air, and the result was much more powerful than anything else on the market.

Today you’d be hard pressed to find a commercially available vacuum that requires a bag. Nearly all vacuums are bagless now. This fact alone is sufficient to call Dyson a game changer, but going bagless wasn’t enough for the iconic inventor. He did two other things to revolutionize this humble household appliance.

He let you see the dirt

This is the kind of counter-intuitive curveball that only a genius comes up with. Who wants to see dirt? Perhaps it was hubris on Dyson’s part. Showing off. Or perhaps he conceived it initially for sales demonstrations, as a sensible way to show how much more dirt the Dyson sucked up than the competition (he was not only the company’s engineer, but its pitchman). As it turned out though, everyone wanted to see the dirt. People delighted in knowing that this filth they could see with their own eyes was safely trapped in the cannister and no longer soiling their shag carpet.

He made it look like a toy

The Dyson vacuum is nearly all plastic, which isn’t so unusual now, but it was in 2002 when his DC07 first entered the US market. Higher end vacuums at the time were mostly sturdy and serious, and the all-plastic Dyson DC07 cost more than most of them. Instead of trying to hide his product’s “plastic-ness” however, James Dyson embraced it. He made his vacuum cleaners look like toys, using bright colors and whimsical shapes. As a result, you don’t feel like the janitor of your house when you vacuum with a Dyson.

It’s actually sort of fun.

This is intended to be the first of seven (possibly more) posts on game-changing business ideas.

It’s often difficult to recognize when something changes the game. A few months or years down the road, you can usually trace a trail of copycats and wannabes back to the original idea, but even then, sometimes it’s not immediately apparent how something changed the game, or which aspect of the thing was responsible.

Other game changers are instantly recognizable. The first game changer I planned to write about was the Apple iPhone, but after thinking about it for a few seconds, I decided to inaugurate this series of posts with an ode to Apple in general.

The Mouse and GUI (1983)

Apple has built its house on one game changer after another. They introduced the mouse and GUI concept to the mass market way back in 1983, which may be the biggest game change in the history of personal computing. In many ways, the mouse and GUI is the very essence of personal computing. If you’re not a developer or a sysadmin, can you even imagine a command-prompt universe?

“Lifesavers candy” iMacs (1998)

In 1998, Apple released its candy-colored “Bondi Blue” iMac, and the world said “hold on, you can design a computer?” Now every previously overlooked appliance and utensil is designed, from toothbrushes to toilet brushes.

The iPod and iTunes (2001)

In 2001, Apple unveiled the first iPod. Portable music wasn’t revolutionary (Sony’s walkman was first to blaze that trail). The ability to carry all your music with you was new, but not revolutionary either. The scroll wheel UI was innovative, and super efficient, but not game changing. The real game changing thing about the iPod was what it did for MP3. The iPod made MP3s mainstream, and it’s no coincidence that the music industry killed Napster just as the iPod took off, paving the way for the iTunes Store (or iTunes Music Store as it was called at the time).

The iPhone (2007)

In 2007, Apple launched the first iPhone. Hard to believe it was only four years ago, since it’s become so deeply nested in my life. Everyone was wowed by the touchscreen. So sensitive, responsive and precise. And the way it bounces! So kinetic! But it’s not the screen that makes the iPhone a game changer. I played with various touchscreen prototype devices back in 2002-2003 when I worked for Vodafone. I recognized the touchscreen as the future of mobile phones, and so did everyone else who used them. The touchscreen was simply inevitable.

So it’s not the screen that changed the game. It’s the App Store. Apple opened the mobile phone up to developers, and lo the developers didst come. Now there are lots and lots of touchscreen smartphones, and lots of would-be App Stores. There’s the Android Marketplace, Blackberry App World and the Nokia Ovi Store, not to mention app stores launched by the various carriers. But if you ask iPhone users why they don’t want to switch to Android (or ask users who did switch what they miss most), many will still say it’s the apps.

Meetings without a specific agenda are evil.

A vague agenda isn’t good enough. It’s a waste of everyone’s time. Know exactly what you want to accomplish, and know exactly who needs to be there and why. Exception: if you haven’t had a 1:1 conversation with your boss or a particular underling in weeks, then you should set aside 30 minutes to do so. Agenda or not.

Standing Meetings are evil.

Are you meeting every day or every week just to see if there’s something to meet about? Are you a manager who created a standing meeting in order to keep tabs on details you don’t actually need to care about? Is the agenda vague, old, or nonexistent? Exception: Standing meetings that take up 10 minutes or less, with everyone literally standing, might actually be fruitful. Also, standing 1:1 meetings with boss/underling (see above) are a good idea, but probably don’t need to happen more than twice a month.

Two-hour meetings are evil.

For that matter, one hour meetings are evil. I’ve rarely been in a two-hour or even one-hour meeting where more than 20% of the discussion was relevant to me. Of course, I’m not a CEO. if I was, then I suppose all company business would be relevant to me. Still, if I was a CEO, I don’t think I’d want my people wasting 80% of two hours in a meeting just sitting there because the stuff their colleagues are saying is relevant to me. Exception: “Working” meetings (e.g. whiteboard sessions) where momentum is carrying things along, and the participants are still energized.

Midday meetings are evil.

It’s hard enough to get into a rhythm with all the unscheduled interruptions that occur throughout the day, but it’s hard to even try to get into a rhythm when you know you’re going to have to stop right before lunch anyway. Meetings should happen at either the very beginning or the very end of the day. Exception: Lunch meetings. You’re going to stop and eat anyway, so why not get something done? On the other hand, a pause for food should also be a pause for sanity.

A while back I wrote a post called my favorite web services, and I thought I would revisit it in the spirit of end-of-the-year (or decade I suppose) lists. However, the notion of “web” services has gotten blurrier and blurrier, so this time I decided to make this list more generally about my digital life and the various tools I use.

New since the last round…

Evernote: I once called this the best free application there is, and I’ll stand by that. I use it for everything imaginable. I take snapshots of whiteboards at work and save them in Evernote, and they become searchable. I use the iPhone app on the bus to quickly jot down the little ideas and inspirations I have. I do the same while driving, except I use the voice note feature. I forward useful emails – or snippets of emails – from local mailing lists like Urban Daddy and K & L Wines to my Evernote email alias. And lots lots more. I can’t believe all of this costs me nothing.

Dropbox: I work with a user experience designer who’s based in Israel and a development team based in Romania, and Dropbox has become absolutely essential to me. I keep all my current projects in a Dropbox folder on my Mac, which looks and behaves like any other local folder except that it syncs with a folder on the Dropbox website, plus a folder on my Israeli colleague’s computer, and one on my home computer, one on my iPhone, etc. So I’ll work on a file during my workday, and – with the time difference – my colleague in Israel takes over after I leave for the day. We can do this without changing our normal way of working.

Things: A basic to-do list app for Mac (desktop) and iPhone. I haven’t found the perfect to-do list manager yet – they’re either over-engineered or overly simplistic – but Things is pretty good.

Instapaper: One of those ideas that’s so simple, it’s amazing that no one did it before. Then again, its utility is very narrow and specific. I use it like this: I read my twitters on the bus ride to work, over a spotty 3G connection. Within any given tweet I might see a link to something that sounds interesting. I usually don’t want to read web pages on the bus, on my phone because of the slow connection, and also because I want to get through a day’s worth of my friends’ tweets in 40 minutes. So I just send the interesting links to Instapaper where they wait for me to read them later.

Twitter: I kept my distance from Twitter for a while and dismissed it as something that seemed trival, noisy and pointless. I was wrong, and I admit it.

Facebook: I’ve changed my tune about Facebook too. Now that no one seems to “poke” me much anymore, and I’m not constantly being challenged to quizzes, I find myself spending a lot more time on Facebook. I use it mainly for the news feed – to stay connected with friends.

Still awesome…

Google: I use Google for pretty much everything now it seems. Just today, we were ordering prints of some photos from Shutterfly Smug Mug, and we had a choice of matte, glossy and something called “lustre.” Unable to find a definition on the Shutterfly website, my wife asked me, “What’s ‘lustre?’” So I Googled ‘matte vs. glossy vs. lustre’ and immediately found the answer in the first search result. If a piece of information exists, then you can be pretty sure that someone has put it on a website somewhere, and Google can take you right to it. That is all.

Google Groups: This was essential during our wedding planning last year. The members of our group included me, my wife (then fiancee) and a couple of family members who were helping us with the planning. Whenever one of us would email one of our vendors, we would CC our Google Group’s email alias (groupname@googlegroups.com), and everyone in the group would receive a copy of the email. More importantly, the whole thread was recorded and available to all of us on the web.

G Reader: Blogs are supposedly on their way out (I don’t see it), but G Reader is still a big part of my daily web travels.

Delicious: I use Twitter and G Reader to discover things. I send the good things to Instapaper, which is kind of like short term memory. Delicious, then, is like long term memory. If something seems good enough that I think I might want to refer back to it a year from now, or share it with someone down the road, then I save it as a Delicious bookmark.

Wordpress: It’s just an amazing blogging platform. This year I customized a new theme. I also added Facebook Connect login, plus social sharing (at the bottom of each post), related posts (in my RSS feed only), Google Sitemaps support, and more. Each of these things took me about 10 minutes, thanks to the community of WordPress devotees out there making the platform better and better every day.

Yahoo Pipes: I use it mostly to aggregate and filter RSS feeds, which I can then consume or republish. Check out my Bay Area food events Twitter feed to see an example: FoodFeed SF. It’s made up of a dozen or so RSS feeds, aggregated and filtered (to remove duplicates and irrelevant posts) then sent to Twitter via Twitterfeed.

Plaxo: I use it to keep my local address book and calendars synced with Gmail and my iPhone. Love it.

Pandora: Great music a click away, and the iPhone app is awesome too. I hook it up to my stereo and rock out. Also a great place to discover new artists.

Yelp: I rarely contribute anymore, but I still use Yelp all the time – especially the iPhone app. It’s effectively my Yellow Pages to San Francisco. I can find things near me, read reviews and then call businesses with one click.

Standing by…

Foursquare: I love the idea of Foursquare, but I haven’t carved out the time to start using it. I’ve been known to dis it and dismiss it like I once did with Twitter and Facebook, but I don’t want to eat my words again, so I’ll just say it hasn’t found its place in my digital life yet.

Also, tumblr, posterous, ommwriter

Awesome but not for me…

12 Seconds: I’m using this as an example, but I could just as easily use Ustream, Qik, Blip, YouTube or even my own employer – Kyte. Online video has arrived, and there are a lot of amazing tools out there. The mobile apps are especially exciting to me. I’m just not really a video guy. I don’t like to talk into a webcam or see myself on the screen. Just too introverted I guess.

One of the things that stood out for me amongst all the hype around the Motorola Droid before the device hit the market was the screen resolution: a whopping 480 x 854 pixels. At first I thought it was a misprint.

Once I verified the specs, I started making my design templates for the Droid in Omnigraffle, and I ended up spending a lot of time tweaking the scale of my document to get the right amount of stuff on the screen. I was struck by how different everything had to be compared to the templates I use to design for other devices. In fact, each of my device-specific templates uses a different scale.

This seems strange when you consider that the devices are all roughly the same size, physically:

I was suddenly curious, so I decided to see what things would look like if I scaled the various devices as if the pixel densities of their respective screens were equal, and everything else was relative to that (actual pixel density of each device is noted in the image below):

As you can see, when you adjust for pixel density, the Droid is practically a tablet compared to the iPhone.

To better illustrate the difference, here are the two images with one overlaid on the other:

I hear designers talk a lot about the differences in capabilities and design vocabularies across the range of mobile devices, but variations in screen resolutions are another challenge designers have to confront in the mobile world. It’s especially important with touch screen devices, since the right target size for a user’s finger tap is a physical question more than a matter of pixels. Apple’s guideline for buttons is a height of 48 pixels for example, but the same physical height on the Nokia N97 measures about 58 pixels.

I updated one of my two Macbook Pros to Snow Leopard yesterday, and although the official price tag for the new OS is only $29, the real cost is a bit higher. For one thing, I was running older versions of a couple of apps – specifically FontExplorer and Parallels – that are not compatible with Snow Leopard.

There’s also an opportunity cost, since the install itself took about an hour, and then I had to spend several more hours troubleshooting and fine-tuning to get everything to work satisfactorily.

So, here’s my breakdown…

Right now I’m running trial versions of the latest FontExplorer (which also doesn’t work with Snow Leopard) and Parallels 4 (which does). I may switch to FontAgent Pro and VMware, but this wouldn’t change my final price by much.

I’m not thrilled about all this, and I’m not going to upgrade my other Mac for now.

What if the company that made your computer forced you to use only their web browser and email application? (Remember, Microsoft was prosecuted for less than this). What if that company could dictate what software – of any type – other companies were allowed to make for your computer, what you were allowed to install and where you could buy it? What if these restrictions were only vaguely defined, then enforced in a totally ad-hoc way, on a case-by-case basis – after the software was already built?

Obviously that would be crazy, and obviously I’m talking about the iPhone.

After a week of high-profile App Store snafus (Google Voice, Ninja Words), there’s a bona fide Apple backlash a-brewin’. Leading the charge are the likes of Michael Arrington and Om Malik, who have each made a very public point of ditching their iPhones, and Jason Calacanis who wrote an epic 5-part case against apple. Last week’s hubbub was even enough to warrant a response from Phil Schiller, Apple’s SVP of product marketing.

The iTunes App Store process is broken in all kinds of ways, but few people question its basic premise: an app for almost anything, and a distribution model that (a number of hiccups notwithstanding) guarantees big bucks for Apple and gives developers access to a high-profile storefront. It’s proven to be such a cash cow that everybody is getting on the app store bandwagon. There’s the Android Market, Blackberry App World, Nokia’s Ovi Store, the Sony Ericsson Application Shop, plus stores from carriers like Vodafone, Verizon and who knows how many others. The game has changed. It’s all about mobile apps now.

Think about it though. In today’s web-powered world, imagine if you had to install a special app on your computer to use Facebook, plus another one for Twitter, another for YouTube, another for getting weather reports, another for checking your stock portfolio, etc. Multiply this situation by all the different mobile operating systems and form factors, and it’s essentially the same problem that has plagued mobile from the beginning. On the positive side I suppose, there’s no shortage of work for mobile developers when there are a half dozen different Facebook apps that need to be made.

Chris Messina posted a fantastic and provocative piece on his blog last week entitled Steve Jobs Hates the App Store wherein he argues that “the iPhone has always been about the web” and that:

…development for the iPhone platform is a distraction. It’s taking our eyes off the ball, and ignoring the bigger shift that’s happening beneath our feet. Developing iPhone apps now means postponing a better and more capable web until later, because so much energy is fixated on the cool whiz-bang effects in the iPhone platform that just haven’t been implemented in browsers… yet.

It’s like going back to the days of the CD-ROM, before the web as we know it existed.

Messina sees the future, and the future is the web. The only things he sees standing between the anachronistic, walled-garden, app-store-filled present and the glorious web-powered future are a good discovery paradigm (he compares the iTunes App Store to the “Yahoo! directory phase” of the web) and current browser limitations (e.g. Safari for iPhone can’t talk to the iPhone’s GPS or accelerometer).

I would argue, however, that the web has already given us a much more powerful discovery paradigm than iTunes. It’s called Google (there’s also Amazon and BestBuy and all the other places you shop for software, music, etc. online).

I would also argue that a third big missing piece is a business model. The most reliable way to make money from iPhone apps is to charge a one-time fee for downloading them. Ad-supported apps don’t pay for themselves, and Apple doesn’t yet support a subscription model (or maybe they do – various sources conflict).

Once the app store bubble pops and we move to web apps, the one-time fee model will have to go away. Mobile ads will probably be a bigger market by then, but it still won’t be enough to support most services. So SaaS will probably become the dominant business model for mobile web apps. Many could be sold as value-adds to existing (desktop) web services. The death of the one-time fee model would be OK with developers, but Apple would lose their 30% cut. They’re bound to resist and push back against any big shift toward web apps, but resistance will prove futile.

Which brings me to my final point, and the title of this post.

Despite all the hullabaloo over Apple’s rejection of the Google Voice iPhone app, Google themselves took it in stride. And it seems they might simply relaunch Google Voice as a web app.

Vic Gundotra, Google Engineering vice president and developer evangelist told the Mobilebeat Conference last month that the web had won and users of mobile phones would get their information and entertainment from browsers in the future. He suggested it wouldn’t be cost effective for Google to support all the different native mobile platforms – from iPhone to Blackberry to Windows Mobile and all the flavors of Nokia. In his words:

“What we clearly see happening is a move to incredibly powerful browsers. Many, many applications can be delivered through the browser and what that does for our costs is stunning. We believe the web has won and over the next several years, the browser, for economic reasons almost, will become the platform that matters and certainly that’s where Google is investing.”

In a nutshell, Chrome for mobile is why Android will win. The Google Chrome mission statement is tailor-made for mobile. This bit in particular resonated with me:

To most people, it isn’t the browser that matters. It’s only a tool to run the important stuff – the pages, sites and applications that make up the web. Like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome is clean and fast. It gets out of your way and gets you where you want to go.

Nowhere is it more important for browsers to “get out of your way” than on small screens. When Google makes a mobile browser powerful enough to run real applications, then native mobile apps will die a merciful death. And what would constitute “powerful enough?”

• The browser would have to talk to native device functions like the camera, accelerometer and GPS
• The browser “chrome” (pun intended) would have to almost completely disappear in favor of the application currently running.
• Irrelevant browser functions would ideally go away (e.g. the browser’s main menu gets overtaken by the web app’s main menu).
• The browser would have to retain user and session information better than today’s mobile browsers do
• The browser would have to have to be faster, more stable and basically feel “smoother” in the way it performs

Two parting thoughts:

First, there will always be a place for native apps. Games and other apps that don’t require any connectivity, and that involve a more “immersive” experience will probably always be better as fully-native apps. But 90% of the apps in the iTunes store are really web apps in disguise.

Second, borrowing from Winston Churchill, I’ll say the iPhone is the worst phone out there, except for all the others I’ve tried. Seriously though, I really like my iPhone, and I’m happy with the apps I’ve installed. I’m not giving these up anytime soon, but that doesn’t mean I think this paradigm makes sense.

I’ve spent much of my career working at well-regarded agencies – large and small, and I’ve worked with my share of brilliant people at each of them. At the same time, I’ve seen and worked on very few client engagements that I’d really consider successful. Even when the end result was satisfactory to everyone involved, it invariably came via a lot of bumps and birthing pains.

It was amazing how often we’d pitch a project and hear from the prospective client how dissatisfied they were with their previous agency. After we won the project and completed the work, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out they were saying the same thing about us to the next group. This is borne out by my friends who work on the “client side” and often complain about the agency teams they have to work with.

Agency failures and disappointments are expensive – often in the multi-millions, and sometimes I think people on both sides of the relationship delude themselves into thinking they’re satisfied with the results because the alternative is too painful to acknowledge – especially since the relationship is a temporary one. This state of affairs persists of course because companies only keep on staff the personnel it takes to keep them running. If they want to do something big or new, they need to seek outside help.

Given all this, there are few resources out there that compare agencies in any useful way. Perhaps the best is the Forrester Wave Report, but you’re supposed to drop $2,000 if you want to read it (or you can find the PDF on the Razorfish website for free).

The Wave Report is only as good as the crop of agencies it evaluates of course (I worked at a couple of the pack leaders – at least according to its conclusions), so hiring the “best” of the lot doesn’t guarantee a successful project. Case in point: of all the reference sites submitted by the agencies themselves to Forrester for the Q2 report, only one website got a passing grade based on Forrester’s website review methodology.

So, from an insider’s perspective, here are some things you should know about agencies the next time you’re looking for one to help you:

Every agency has a comfort zone – Some agencies excel at making killer microsites. Others design big, complicated internal systems. Still others are on the cutting edge of social media strategy. Most claim they can do it all. If you’re clear about what you need, then make sure the agency you hire has a strong track record of doing that thing. It sounds obvious, but this is a mistake I’ve seen companies make over and over again. And make sure it’s a recent track record – agencies are revolving doors for talent. If you’re not clear about what you need, then find an agency that has a strong track record of helping companies figure that out. Don’t commit to that agency for doing the rest of the work (be aware, though, that they will “figure out” that you need them). Finally, forget about the person you know at agency X who did such great work for you at agency Y. Agency X might be totally wrong for this new project.

Agencies have no bench – At agencies, it’s all about billable hours, so they don’t want people around who aren’t working on something for a client. The reality though, is that work comes in waves. This means the full-time employees are usually over-extended – especially the really good ones. The best staff are typically booked at full utilization on one project, supporting several other projects and helping the sales team pitch new work. When a wave of new work is signed, agencies scramble to hire contract help to fill the gaps – freelancers who have little context and little vested interest.

You aren’t likely to get the team that pitched you (no matter what they promise) – The agency brings its best and brightest into the important pitches. They want to put these people on your project, they really do, but even if they become your team on paper, you have to realize that that crack Art Director is still finishing up the last project (which is running a couple weeks beyond its original deadlines), and she’s being asked to do spec work for two new pitches that are suddenly more important than anything else in the whole office. No matter that the agency promised this would not happen.

You won’t work with the thought leaders - Every agency has these people. They appear on panels. They have blogs and lots of twitter followers. They write articles. Their job is to make the agency seem smart and cool and up on all the new trends. They are just celebrities though, and in reality, these folks are pretty irrelevant to what you’re trying to do. They will swoop in to pitch meetings and kickoff meetings and they’ll woo you with all kinds of buzz words about social media and stuff. I don’t mean to suggest they’re not smart and up on stuff, but they are not rubber-hitting-the-road kinds of people. They have some influence on the kinds of ideas the team brings to your project, but much less than they or the agency would like to believe.

They always know the answer (even when they don’t) – Clients ask all kinds of questions, expecting the smart agency dudes they’re paying to have answers. “Are people still doing podcasts? Should we be podcasting?” the client might ask, and the smart agency dude is not going to say, “That’s a good question. We should investigate that. There might be some opportunity there.” Nope. He’s going to give you his gut response. I don’t mean to suggest there isn’t value in a smart agency dude’s gut response. Just know what you’re getting.

They don’t know your industry - You, the client, are the subject matter expert. There might be a few people speckled around the agency that know your industry, but agencies don’t have a good way of identifying or finding these people. It goes something like: “I think Rob might have worked on some XBox stuff when he was with AKQA. Do you know if he did?” To pitch you, and to staff your project, good agency people will dive into some research, but it will be the first research those particular people have done with respect to your industry. So when it comes to knowledge, you have depth. The agency is the fresh pair of eyes.

They don’t know your organization - Your company is a big variable as far as the agency – and the success of the project – is concerned. Variables equate to risks. You and the agency will try to anticipate the risks, but you can never really know what form they will take. Agencies are used to moving faster than most client companies move. They want to get the work done and billed so they can move on to the next thing. You want to get maximum value out of the agency. These things are in natural opposition. There are new and strange deliverables and milestones that you and your bosses are seeing for the first time. There are milestones and deliverables you require that the agency has no experience with. There are personalities and politics. And then there are more mundane risks – like your IT organization refusing to give the agency VPN access to your company’s network, even though the project suddenly can’t move forward without it. Every project that involves an agency has a certain amount of this stuff, and it always causes pain.

That’s my insider scoop. I hope this information is useful the next time you’ve got the agency pitch guys coming your way.