If you weren’t able to attend this year’s Web App Masters Tour, we have the next best thing for you and your organization: Web App Masters 2011 OnDemand.

This is your opportunity to hear all 12 Masters from the Tour give their 75-minute presentations. The OnDemand collection consists of 15 hours of audio recordings, Q&A from the audience, and the Masters presentation decks. It’s a toolkit that you can share with everyone in your office. You can access it any time you want, as often as you want.

Web App Masters OnDemand covers these topics

Constructing sites for active communities
Building native device vs. mobile browser-based applications
Producing beautiful data visualizations
Using data for design decisions
Integrating infographics and games to engage your users
Designing for mobile first
Handling rich interaction techniques on multiple devices & platforms
Looking at AARP’s journey into web-based applications
Conducting successful kickoff meetings
Finding users’ deepest needs and desires
Designing Salesforce.com’s Cloud Apps
Creating great design principles for your team
Ensuring a positive user experience with mobile

Learn more about Web App Masters OnDemand.

With Web App Masters 2011 OnDemand you’ll get

Fifteen hours of audio from 12 Masters
The best of the Q&A from all the tour stops
Presentation slides from all 12 talks
Unlimited access to the material any time you want it, as often as you want it

Order Web App Masters 2011 OnDemand now
No pre-ordering and no waiting for a disc. With just a few clicks, you can have Web App Masters OnDemand at your fingertips and start to improve your web apps today.

Purchase Web App Masters OnDemand by August 30, 2011, for $179. After the 30th, the price
increases to $229.

Now go get your bundle of goodness.

Lately, I haven’t been making friends with people who work at design agencies. I think it’s something I said.

It’s definitely something I said. In fact, I can tell you exactly what I said.

However, to do that, we need to revisit some research we’ve conducted over the last few years. We’ve been looking at the process of making design decisions and realized there are five distinct styles. (If you haven’t read or seen me talk about these, go read about them now. Otherwise this won’t make a lot of sense.)

If you’re a designer, any of these styles can produce great results that delights customers. However, for many, the most advanced styles, activity-focused and experience-focused design, are the more desirable projects. That’s where the really cool stuff happens and where the biggest challenges are found.

And this is where I get in trouble with the agency folks. As we’ve been researching these five styles, we found an interesting finding: agencies can’t do activity-focused or experience-focused design.

Many do self design. Some very successful agencies make a lot of money with genius design. (And there are many that do unintentional design, but they probably shouldn’t brag about that.) However, it seems activity-focused and experience-focused design is out of reach of the agency world.

Now, many agencies try to sell themselves as doing this work. And many agencies get clients to hire them to do this work. That’s not what I’m talking about.

I’m talking about creating successful designs using these decision styles. That doesn’t happen with an agency. It can only happen in-house.

Activity-focused design takes a long time. It requires making an investment. The team accrues knowledge over a long period, studying users and their activities, implementing solutions, and seeing how those solutions work. It takes many iterations to do well.

Most agencies aren’t brought in for long-term iterative work. Eventually, all agencies leave. When they leave, the knowledge the team has gained walks out the door with them. Then the client is left with something they don’t know how to maintain or improve. The project fails.

Experience-focused design is even more difficult. The designs often require changes at touch points all over the organization. For example, for a retail business to create a seamless experience, they’ll have to change things on the web site, in the stores, at the call center, in the distribution centers, and in the merchandizing department.

Agencies can’t have this kind of reach. It takes commitment at all levels. It’s too expensive to teach an agency how your business works. They don’t have the political clout to make the hard decisions.

Sure, a company can hire an agency to give them ideas. Agencies have really smart folks with lots of great ideas. But the long-term, in-depth execution has to come from within. The company has to make the commitment to investing on their own.

Needless to say, statements like this don’t make me popular with agencies. Recently, I’ve found myself sitting in front of agency owners, defending this position. They don’t like it at all.

I could be wrong. (It’s happened before.) It could be that an agency could take over the management and operations of a business and build a fabulous design using activity-focused or experience-focused design. I haven’t found one yet, but it could happen.

I just hope that agency’s contract never ends, because then their (now former) client is screwed.