I never in a million years thought that these words would be coming out of my mouth but…I have a great deal of respect for this marketing firm and I think that they have a lot to teach user experience professionals. I base this statement on this article and a few months of following their blog. Agenda is the brainchild of Lucian James whose approach to marketing seems to be based on two simple principles:

1. Truly respect people.
2. Be flexible and creative in your methods.

The first principle is the one I least expected to hear from a marketer but it appears to be one, if not the, reason for Agenda’s success. On top of that, he has a real appreciation for how culture matters in people’s lives. They tell their clients to forget about being cool and to concentrate on being relevant to the lives of their consumers. Another way to think about this is that coolness is not particularly user-centered but relevance clearly is. While simple, this is a powerful insight.

I wonder how UX practitioners could benefit from applying this sort of thinking. For the most part, even those who have grasped this insight have had a difficult time putting it into practice. For example, “relevance” is a major focus in in informationa and library science research but most of this work defines relevance as an association between a query and a document rather than anything truly tied to the person and the way they makes sense of the world. So much HCI and UX work on culture seems to try its hardest to take culture and meaning out of the equation or at the very least uses a fairly impoverished version of the concept. It would be great to move beyond “designing for multicultural contexts” where we see culture as just another way of differentiating groups to a real appreciation of how people make meaning in their lives and how the products and systems we develop are or are not relevant in this process. This could help us move beyond the strict cognitive model of people as essentially quasi-random computers or as consumers that must be persuaded and manipulated. Those models don’t truly respect humans (and I’m sure that most researchers who apply them don’t think of themselves that way). How can we move beyond cognitive or demographic models of people’s social location and behavior focusing on metrics likes clicks, time to target, income, and educational level? As Lucian James says:

“Brands are an integral part of society—they may not be terribly deep, or as worthy as earlier social indicators, such as where you were educated, or how much money you had. But they are no less arbitrary, and I firmly believe they have a role as a cultural leveler. In a global world, they are the way that we recognize each other.”

Other cultural work has shown that culture is not only the way we recognize each other but also ourselves. This has to be central to any approach to human-centered design.