Get the right UX expert
Don’t hire a UX Expert before you read this!!!
So, you’re looking for a UX/UI partner. You have a new product, an app or a web system, or maybe you’re improving an existing product. You already know how important UX is, you don’t need convincing, and you know that you want your product to be great. Where do you start? Who do you hire?
Maybe you are considering hiring an in-house expert which may actually make sense, but you’re not sure if they should be full-time, and how many years of experience they need to have.
You think that you have a pretty good idea of the product in terms of functionality, prospective customers, and maybe even know the market fit because your exiting clients are requesting it. You even wrote a product design document with a features list and assessed the budget. Maybe you even investigated the R&D involved and tried to estimate the effort, but as you are moving forward you understand that you must have tangible designs and user flows you can show around to get the project running.
At this point, you wonder if a UX/UI agency can help you, and how much it would cost. You search for a few on the internet or ask around for recommendations. You look at a bunch of agency web sites. All of them look great- very creative, with attractive screen-shots of their well-designed portfolio, and maybe even some well written case studies. Some may even have experience in your domain, but your project is unique, so you are not confident that they can pull it off. Worst of all, you can’t really tell the difference between them.
So, you decide to set a few meetings and meet them in-person — let’s say 2–3 agencies. You meet with a sales person and probably with a very experienced designer or partner. If you’re lucky, they are knowledgeable, and they ask you questions that you may have not thought about before, about your customers, users, and your business. You get some value from the meetings. You’re also presented the design process, the research, the ideation, the visual brand process and so forth. A lot of professional terms with rather abstract meanings fly through your brain — strategy, brand, user stories, wireframes, look & feel, visual branding, detailed design, and many more.
But you’re still wondering, “how much will this cost me?”, ”how much time will this take?”, ”What is my effort in this?”. The answers you’ll get range from “Well, we can’t tell you right now”, “Its like asking us how much a re-design of your home will be…it depends right?”, “We’ll need to do research, agree on a strategy and the functional scope”…
Now, you are waiting for a quote, and at this point, I truly sympathize with you. I know, because I had to make these quotes over and over again and tried to make them fair, clear, and transparent (like most agencies do). But, there are just too many unknown variables at hand, the risk is high and the agency’s margin is usually very low. I know you are doing the numbers of how much a design salary is, and comparing it with how much you are asked to pay, but you do not consider the pricey sales processes, the marketing expenses, the office, the sick days… oh, I don’t want to burden you with all that crap, but the bottom line is that even the best agencies achieve 5–10% profit margin at best, which makes them very cautious when scoping and estimating work.
Enough kvetching, back to you. So, you waited patiently for the quotes, and finally got them- hopefully after a few days. They are pretty elaborate, you start reading them, but they don’t really make sense to you. They either describe a process or a list of features or screens or something that gives some understanding for the bottom line — but then comes the bottom line and it does not make sense to you either. Here are the options you will most likely receive:
The Hours Bank
The design agency will ask you to purchase an hours bank. They will estimate the amount of work required and ask you to pay in advance for an large hours bank that will give you a volume discount with some soft timeline commitment.
Price wise, this looks fair, but there is no guarantee that the project will be completed in the estimated time frame. If things go south or they allocate a junior designer to work on it, you may not finish your project on time. You never worked with them. They may have good recommendations, but you can never be sure that you are going to be assigned with the people that were originally recommended. Some of these agencies hire freelance UX designer to do the UX part and none of them can commit that the people you meet will be involved in your project and even if they are involved, you don’t know if they will be the one who will actually do the work. Let me tell you from my experience, an experienced UX/Product designer will do the job in half the time of a less experienced one, who may not be able to actually do the job at all.
You ask yourself, “What if we’ll need more hours?”… You’ll probably need to buy an additional hours package, but you may not have that budget allocated! Suddenly you find yourself in the risk assessment business L.
The Steps
“Ok, we don’t know how much time it will take to do your app, but we can price the research and the concept and maybe the visual design.” A fixed price process is always attractive, but here comes the tricky part. What will be included in the concept? How many user flows? Which part would be on the wires. How detailed will it be and how will I know if the concept is any good?
It will probably take 1–3 months until you have the concept in wire frames. You may show it around to users — but let me assure you that the users do not understand wire frames. Few people do — and these people are usually professional product people and UX designers.
And then what? How do I plan my budget further? You may get a rough estimation but that emphasizes that this is indeed “rough” and may significantly change. What about the timeline? The steps program is a little better than the hours bank but the outcomes are very abstract for most people and the personnel problem from the hours bank is still very relevant (although in many agencies, the concept part is done only by senior designers)
The Fixed Price
This sounds like the best option for you. You know how much you are going to pay as you both commit on a product design doc you may have written and you think it is very clear-but this presents a whole new set of problems.
First, the scope. In many cases, you, or your product manager will come up with what you think is a very specific feature set or even wireframes. However, a good UX designer will probably tear this apart because this is the reason you came to them in the first place. You want them to look at the required functionality, your business goals and your users’ needs and motivation and make an experience that will make the most of all of them. If you already solved it — you may not need a UX designer, just find someone that will make your wires look nice… but usually, this is not the case.
So, the scope is not really set and this will be a pain for you and the agency moving forward. You do not want to work with an agency that is losing serious money because of misunderstanding of the scope. This is a lose-lose situation.
Second, you may see huge differences between the quotes you get and they are really difficult to explain. Some are due to misunderstanding of your requirement (the agency has really little time to deeply understand your needs), some are because of differences in process (more research, different methodologies) and some are related to the quality of work. UX is like engineering, until you actually put the design in front of users, you don’t really know how good it is. Portfolios and case studies are too abstract or too specific and you can never know if it was a great idea to begin with or that it was the work of the UX person (you can and should ask reference customers).
Now, your real pain is that you cannot figure out from the quotes why they are so different, and you have serious concerns that the lower offers reflect on the quality or on the scope — and you’re not sure if any of these are going to work for you.
The engagement contracts (or “the squads”)
This is where things get really complex on your end. The agency will assign a team to your project. It’s really like you hired an in-house team. They will be dedicated to your project and will carry out the needed work. If you only need to “make it look nice”, this may be your best option, but if you actually need UX/UI and Product work, you need a multi-disciplinary team and in different stages of the project. The effort will most likely not be divided based on specific personnel and eventually, you will not be able to manage this.
For a long- term relationship, if you know your required volume of work, this may be a perfect win-win arrangement. But for the initial stages of the project it really gets messy and you are still left with the big uncertainties of who will do the work and how much time it will take.
The Solution — A Design Sprint
After years of owning an agency, I have given hundreds of quotes like these (all forms of them!). They are as painful to the agency as they are for you. Therefore, we stopped. Instead of any of the above we are now giving a very simple “fix priced” quote which is only possible if you start your project with a design sprint.
A Design Sprint at Red is a 4-day process for rapidly solving big challenges, creating new products, or improving existing ones.
It compresses potentially months of work into a few days.
The design sprint process was invented at google and was perfected and validated to become one of the hottest trends for leading startups and corporate around the globe.
The big idea is to build a high-fidelity prototype and test it with real users in only 4 days. This reveals the market fit and clarifies the most important elements in your product and UX challenges. Best of all, it validates these critical questions and aligns all the key stakeholders, 2 weeks into the project.
At RED, we offer a very straight forward 1 month — fixed price process in which we do 2 consecutive sprints — an initial design sprint and an iteration sprint. I.E. after validating our product idea, we run an iteration sprint where we implement the feedback we got from the users and test it again. This guarantees that we have a clear understanding of our MVP and its market fit.
After the sprint month, you will have a high-fidelity, detailed prototype that’s been tested on 10 users, as well as a clear definition of the product’s functionality, prioritization, full alignment from key stakeholders, and the main UX issues solved and tested.
The remainder of the work can now be easily scoped and planned, and you can either hire a junior designer to finish it, or continue with the agency.
After years of creating hundreds of projects for fantastic customers, I truly believe that using the Sprint is by far the best method at hand.
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You can learn more on design sprints click here
You can also listen to this quick explanation
