Starting out: soft skills outlast tools
Paul Boag has worked in digital for 25 years and writes and consults on user experience, conversion rate optimization and digital transformation. Asked what he would tell his younger self at the start of a career, he points away from craft entirely: focus on the soft skills. Tools and design techniques come and go, whereas being persuasive, presenting ideas well and not being difficult to work with last.
He sees a gap in how the industry teaches those skills. Publications including Smashing Magazine run hundreds of posts on design and development technique, but far fewer on surviving a meeting with your boss, pitching a design or reviewing someone else's code without coming across badly. Boag's own writing for the magazine has often landed in that space, including an article on mental health that he still counts among his favorites and that had nothing to do with design or development.
He also recalls an early, heavily contested piece about SEO. At the time, he argued that SEO was largely smoke and mirrors and that teams should spend money on content rather than consultants, a position he later revisited on his own site and described as being educated by the response. Google's algorithm has since matured, and much of SEO is now essentially good content, which he calls the right outcome.
A discipline still in its teens
Two and a half decades on, Boag thinks the general understanding of UX has improved substantially: most organizations now recognize its value, and in many larger ones it has some kind of seat at the table, something that was not always true. Confusion persists, though, most visibly in the habit of using UX and UI interchangeably when they are, in his view, very different roles. Integrating an entirely new discipline into existing organizations is cultural change, and cultural change takes time — the field is only about a quarter of a century old, barely out of its teens.
Changing an organization from the inside
The larger the organization, the longer it takes to turn. Boag describes two routes: top-down, where someone in senior management already gets it and the work proceeds from there, or bottom-up, which he says is how it usually has to happen. He frames the bottom-up route as a political movement. Writing a single letter to your MP achieves nothing on its own; large-scale change comes from banding together with like-minded people, making noise and getting the attention of those in power.
In practice that means finding allies who already want the same thing, whether or not they know the term UX. Marketers are an obvious example — UX people are often rude about them, but both groups want customers to be happy, because happy customers repeat-buy and recommend. From there, the work looks like a campaign:
- Write a manifesto setting out what you stand for and the specific change you want.
- Run lunchtime sessions and share UX best practices.
- Send emails, bring in guest speakers, start newsletters and internal blogs.
- Consider an internal conference, effectively a marketing campaign for user experience.
Only approach senior management once the momentum is large enough that it can't be ignored.
Winning the room before the meeting
Boag argues that a pitch meeting with senior management should be a rubber stamp. The outcome should already be decided when you walk through the door, because you have spoken to each attendee individually beforehand and won them over. He identifies two common mistakes. The first is opening with "no one is thinking of the user" — nobody in that room cares about the user except you. People are inherently selfish and each of us worries about our own area; someone from compliance asking you to think about legal obligations would get the same shrug. The second mistake is asking for too much.
His illustration is Disney's MagicBands. A small internal group with an ambitious idea that would require renovating every hotel and theme park does not walk in and ask for a billion dollars, because the answer would be no. It asks for a much smaller sum to build a prototype using a backlog — which is what Disney did. Reduce the ask and take small steps toward the idea.
The second half of the technique is reframing the same proposal for each stakeholder instead of talking about user experience. To finance, the band's upfront cost is offset by lower ongoing operational costs. To marketing, personalized bands that children photograph and share are an excitement generator. To operations, guests no longer carrying money means fewer transactions to process and more efficiency. Everyone in the room has already been convinced, so the meeting only confirms it.
Taming a sprawling web estate
For a large site with dozens of subsites, different owning departments, legacy pages, duplicated content and ambiguous labels, Boag's first move is a shallow audit rather than a deep one — there is simply too much for a proper content audit. He wants a list of every site, an owner and maintainer for each, top-level analytics on traffic, and a sense of when each was last updated.
The point is that most of the estate will turn out to have nobody really owning it, no recent updates and barely any traffic. Everything that cannot be actively managed should be culled, and the argument for that is binary. Either the organization hires enough people to maintain every site — hundreds of staff, which nobody will approve — or it reduces its digital footprint to something manageable. Pitching the first option is a way of arriving at the second.
Archive, don't delete
Nothing needs to be deleted, because staying online is cheap. The archive process Boag describes removes a page from navigation and from search while leaving it reachable through Google and through existing internal links, and adds a banner or notification stating that the page is no longer maintained and giving the date it was last updated. That addresses fears about content disappearing or breaking things.
Content that must stay online for compliance though nobody looks at it follows a similar pattern: out of navigation, potentially out of internal search, but still reachable through a direct link that can be shared as needed. The underlying mistake, he says, is treating every page equally, as if all of it belongs in navigation and search. Much of it is legacy or standalone, and stripping the estate back simplifies both navigation and search so people can find what they came for.
Scope creep, tenders and how to price
Scope creep itself is not the problem. Teams learn things during a project, from user research and testing, and see possibilities in a prototype; those improvements are good. The problem is the insistence on fixed budgets, fixed timelines and fixed deliverables. One way around it is to stop running a redesign as a single end-to-end project covering research through delivery and post-launch optimization. Boag instead runs a sequence of smaller projects — a discovery phase identifying user needs, competition and constraints; then a prototyping phase he can quote and schedule once discovery is done; then a build phase quoted from the tested prototype. Pricing each phase hourly is possible because each informs the next, and scope can change freely between phases since each is its own project.
Procurement processes that demand a fixed price and fixed scope up front are, to him, a warning sign, and he simply avoids them — acknowledging that this is a privileged position. When he ran Headscape, his preferred approach was to quote for the whole job while stating in the tender that the figure was an estimate only, and to introduce the idea of breaking the project into stages, even if the brief asked for a specific set of deliverables. Challenging the brief has two possible outcomes. Either the prospect dismisses you, in which case the project would have been a nightmare of unrealistic expectations and scope problems, or they appreciate the challenge — and your competitors, who followed the procurement rules blindly, suddenly look less proactive and less invested in the outcome. The staged route also works out cheaper, because a whole-project quote has to carry guesses and contingency.
Value-based pricing, by contrast, he calls BS. The principle makes sense in theory — if you earn a company a million, taking 10% of that is reasonable even if your time is worth five thousand. In practice it founders on two things: outside areas like eCommerce, the real numbers are extremely hard to prove, and you cannot guarantee the return, because at quoting time you don't know what constraints will limit the work or what bad ideas the client will insist on.
Getting out of the bottom of the market
Freelancers competing on platforms such as Fiverr and Upwork are stuck at the bottom of the market, where every one of those platforms is price-orientated and where the competition includes free templates from services like Squarespace. Boag's advice is not to play that game. Build your own audience instead of relying on the marketplace's, pick a specific sector, and invest in getting into it and building relationships there until you are the go-to person for that sector — at which point you can raise your rates. He notes that most freelancers and agencies have never been taught marketing, so they fall back on another blog post, another website redesign and a few social updates, which wins nobody.
His own rate sits between £165 and £195 an hour depending on how many hours a client buys, sustainable because demand outstrips his ability to supply. He credits Mike Kus with the pricing question he uses: how much would they have to pay me to want to do this enthusiastically? Work you want is charged at a lower rate, work you don't is charged higher, and the two subsidize each other.
On salaries, he is upfront that he has not worked for an employer since 2001, but he spent years as one and knows the dominant fear is losing staff, because replacing them is expensive. His suggested script for a dissatisfied employee is blunt honesty: tell your boss that inflation has made your costs unsustainable, that you will have to start looking elsewhere, that you are telling them rather than quietly taking sick days, and that if another offer comes in you will come to them first to see whether they want to match it. That may be enough to prompt an increase; if not, follow through and look, then return with an offer. In his experience employers are not out to screw anyone over — they have their own targets and budget constraints — and honesty is the best policy.
Why the books get written
Boag will write another book eventually, though each one costs a month of solid effort in which he earns nothing, and royalties are not the point — nobody gets rich writing books. The real function is positioning. He wrote Digital Adaptation when he wanted digital transformation work, User Experience Revolution when he wanted organizational UX and cultural change work, and Click when he wanted conversion rate optimization work, and each one shifted how people saw his expertise and brought in work on that subject.
That logic cuts both ways. A book on soft skills, or on winning clients, would bring agency and freelance mentorship rather than the larger engagements, which is a much smaller earner than working for a multinational. A book on establishing processes or working inside large enterprises, by contrast, has far more legs for his business. He has no plans to sign anything soon. His closing note is a Winston Churchill line he returns to: success is going from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm — whether the goal is a pay rise, a culture change or a project over the line, keep chipping away.
