How to choose the right UX partner? A guide for business owners.

Today, entrepreneurs realize the importance of UX design and they are willing to invest in it for the success of their organization. But they are often confused about choosing the right UX partner to reap the long-term benefits.

If you’re a business owner in the process of hiring UX designers, then you’ve landed on the right page. We have put together a detailed article that entails identifying and hiring the best UX design partner for your project.

The article covers:

1. Why do you need a UX design partner?
2. Why should you opt for a UX design team instead of an individual designer?
3. When is the right time for you to invest in UX for business?
4. What are the steps to find the best UX partner for your business?
5. What should you expect from a good UX partner?

Why do you need a UX design partner?

UX design determines how a person, the user, interacts with or experiences your product — be it a digital product, service, tangible product, or just a feature. UX designers concern themselves with how the product works and feels.

Any given design problem has no single, or unidirectional solution. UX designers explore different approaches to solving a specific problem. This can range from technical product issues, intricacies of user behavior to changing the fundamental purpose of a product depending on the need of the hour.

It is of paramount importance to invest in a UX partner that understands your business, identifies the problem, and executes an effective design solution.

Why should you opt for a UX design team instead of an individual designer?

UX design is a complex and stage-wise process that includes various roles like:

1. UX Researcher
   Studies and analyzes the business domain and users
2. UX Designer
   Strategizes and creates information architecture, wireframes, and prototypes
3. UX Writer
   Defines the tone of voice and crafts copy according to the product goals
4. Visual Designer
   Crafts visual language by focusing on the look and feel of the product
5. Usability Tester
   Focuses on user flows and user’s ease of using the product
6. UX Lead
   Overlooks, manages, and guides the whole product to maintain consistency

An individual designer may be competent and have some of the areas mentioned above as their strong suit. If you’re looking for a specialized service, you can hire an individual or freelance designer.

But it’s wise to choose a UX design team with specialists for each role to create a more effective and efficient product. With a UX lead overlooking the whole process from ideation to execution and delivery, it’s ideal for creating and scaling your digital products.

A good and supportive UX design team can:

• understands your business domain and goals
• identifies the target users and their needs
• helps you understand the importance and value of UX for your business
• guides you towards more strategic design decisions
• deliver design solutions that drive business along with end-user benefit

When is the right time for you to invest in UX for business?

Different businesses, startups, or companies require UX design services at different levels of their product cycle. It could be to create a new product from scratch, scale and grow the venture or digitally transform the business.

Let’s take hypothetical examples of business owners to understand when to invest in UX.

Demographics

• Age: 37 years
• Location: Minneapolis, Minnesota
• Education: Computer science graduate, MBA dropout

Characteristics

• Started his career as a programmer at a BPO
• Technically astute in the finance domain because of prior work experience
• Serial entrepreneur with sharp business acumen
• Self-learned person

Need for UX design

• Wants to pitch his idea to angel investors for funding
• Needs to create an MVP of his product to garner investment

Demographics

• Age: 29 years
• Location: Brooklyn, New York
• Education: Fashion Design Graduate

Characteristics

• Has worked with a fashion magazine
• Niche and quirky fashion designer
• Social media influencer and content creator
• The first person to host a fashion show virtually

Need for UX design

• Wants to design an eCommerce store as a showcase of her products; it should embody her brand image and characteristics
• Looking for a UX/UI design partner who understands her elite clientele and designs a highly interactive and engaging experience

Demographics

• Age: 24 years
• Location: Boston, Massachusetts
• Education: Management college dropout

Characteristics

• Belongs to a humble family, started working with hotels/motels from a very young age
• Understands tricks and trade of the hospitality business because of work experience
• Self-learned person, tech-savvy
• Outlier with a vision to do something new by fulfilling a gap in the market

Need for UX design

• Owns a bootstrapped startup, has time and capital constraints, need helps with MVP design to pitch his product to prospective clients in the industry
• Seeks design and growth partner that can provide him proper UX consultation

Demographics

• Age: 45 years
• Location: San Francisco, California
• Education: Master’s in Management, Certificate: AI in business

Characteristics

• Deep interest in AI and its implications on business strategy
• An industry veteran with work experience in global companies and MNCs
• An angel investor and a serial entrepreneur with successful exits
• Calculated risk-taker with business acumen
• T-shaped person — depth in the content industry and a broad set of other business skills

Need for UX design

• Has invested seed capital in his venture, created an MVP, and gained a lot of traction in Silicon Valley, needs more investors to scale the project
• Wants to invest in UX from the beginning to create a refined product roadmap that removes unnecessary design efforts in the long run

Once you understand your business goals and identify the need for UX design, the next step is to find the right partner.

What are the steps to find the best UX partner for your business?

1. Search for top UX design agencies

Cliche but essential. Google Search for the top UX agencies. Take references from other businesses and people in your network for the UX agencies they hired.

2. Study their previous work

Check out their previous work portfolio and read the case studies to understand their approach to UX design. Figure out if they have worked on projects in your business domain. Read their blogs and articles to understand the depth of their UX knowledge.

3. Filter agencies according to your requirement

Some agencies are good with UX design services while some have UI design as their forte. Filter the agency according to your product goal. Say, you want to improve the aesthetics of the product then hire a team with UI as their forte.

4. Schedule a discovery session

Schedule an interview meeting or discovery session to get an idea about the communication and collaboration skills of the agency. Identify if they understand your business, target audience, technology platform, and related goals.

What should you expect from a good UX partner?

Following are the characteristics, attributes, and skills that you can expect in a good UX partner

1. They ask the right questions at the right time

A good UX team knows that asking the right questions on a priority basis can help to identify opportunities, reveal underlying needs, and understand user context. To do so they utilize discovery sessions to ask questions about the product idea, business goals, market gap, and users.

A good UX partner probes entrepreneurs to think from all the perspectives of a business canvas.

First stage: Discovery phase — kickoff meeting questions

To better understand your business and product, you can expect these questions in the first meeting:

1. Can you please tell me about your role at your company?
2. What is the industry problem or need we are aiming to solve?
3. What is the business opportunity or value you are adding by creating this product? (for example acquisition, activation, retention, revenue, referral, digitalization, etc.)
4. Who are the end-users or customers? Who is the target audience?
5. How is the product important for the end-users? Will it make a difference in their day-to-day life? How will the product solve the pain points of the users?
6. Who are the competitors? Are there any relevant products we can look at?
7. What makes your product different from the competitors?
8. How do you want to position your product in the market?
9. Which technology platforms and devices should the product be built for?

Second stage: UX strategy phase

They ask questions to understand business objectives, product problems, and user needs. They create a UX design strategy based on these questions to align business needs with end-user benefits. For example:

Let’s say your business problem is

“Over 25% of the new users skip the onboarding process. How do we make them go through the whole process? We think it isn’t engaging the users.”

Instead of directly jumping on the solution to make UI changes, the design team will ask a string of questions to understand the problem:

1. Why does the app have an onboarding process?
2. Does it provide value to the users? If yes, how?
3. How can we deliver the same value by making the process shorter?
4. Should we decrease the number of fields in the onboarding process?
5. Can we allow users to fill in their data after they have logged in?

This process results in a more thoughtful design solution.

A good UX partner asks questions that challenge your assumptions, cause you to stretch and bend your mind, and encourage breakthrough thinking. The questions often help in gaining a new perspective, clarifying goals, and polishing the idea.

2. They understand your business domain and product goals

An experienced UX team knows that to get the UX strategy right, they need to dig deeper than user research. So they try to understand the business from a 360-degree perspective.

By tapping into the nuances of business, they approach UX strategy from a holistic perspective. They create a product roadmap that caters to the end-users while balancing the business needs.

Whether you’re building new functionality for your existing product or creating a digital product from scratch, a good UX partner knows that the approach to design for both of them is different.

Let’s say you have to create a pitch deck to get investment,

“You may want to highlight 20 exciting features of the app to take the investors into confidence but you have a tight budget and time constraints. What will you do?”

At this point, a good approach by your UX partner will be to identify and focus on the top 5 distinguishing features of the product that are not available in the market. They will help you create a pitch deck focused on those features — this will give you an edge over the competition and help you garner attention. It’s a win-win situation.

3. They make you understand UX in your language

Entrepreneurs from all walks of industry like Fintech, Hospitality, Healthcare, Fashion, Logistics, Content, etc. would need good UX design to enhance their product value. This doesn’t mean that UX has to be an entrepreneur’s forte.

A good UX team will not jump on the design solution directly, they will take you through the whole process —

1. Discovery: Understand your business and product goals and make you understand how they will approach your project
2. Ideation: Create Information architecture, wireframes, and user flows. Explain in depth the use and importance of each process
3. Creation: Create low and high-fidelity prototypes, share the prototype with you to go through the product flow. Explain why they chose certain colors, typography, visual elements in the product
4. Validation: They will run you through the outcomes and incorporate feedback from your end if any

To validate the design solutions, they translate their work into its value and impact using the language that business stakeholders are familiar with. For that, they may use metrics that are familiar to you like sales cycle, lead conversions, customer acquisition cost, engagement ratio, etc.

4. They understand the feasibility aspect of technology

An ideal design team would avoid creating something which looks great but can’t be developed at the end of the day. Before designing the product, they discuss the execution with the design engineers or product managers on the below aspects:

• The front-end and back-end technology e.g. WordPress, ASP.NET, React — any third-party plug-ins to be incorporated in the app
• The platform for the app i.e. web, mobile, etc.

If the UX designers don’t understand these technicalities, the design often gets lost in development translation. For example, the design of the product may be great but if the product is still using an old and outdated platform, the final product after development will lack consistency in the user experience and also impact the look and feel.

Good design teams can create designs and quantify them in values and language that design engineers and developers understand. They deliver designs that can be developed properly according to the platform.

5. They can work in your time zone

If they are a remote team working in a different time zone, they ensure their availability in your time zone. They follow certain protocols like:

• They communicate very clearly with your team to set the delivery expectations, grasp the project's scope, and avoid goof-ups.
• They take advantage of technology to conduct their work and use various collaborative tools —

Project management: Jira, Asana, TeamWork, Notion, etc.
Design Tools: Figma, Adobe XD, Sketch, etc.
Communication Tools: Slack, Skype, Hangouts, etc.

• They follow proper frameworks and systems and don’t shortchange the design process or give excuses because they are working remotely

6. They work with your in-house team

When you start working with a design team, introduce them to your in-house team.

A good design team communicates and understands the job roles and responsibilities of the people in your team. To jump-start fruitful relationships, they often get to know about their lives outside of work. Both the teams can establish guidelines, discuss processes and tools.

Aligning the internal work process of your organization and the design team helps in a successful collaboration.

7. They value good communication and trustworthiness

Communication is the key to any business and it is critical when it comes to UX design. A good design team can communicate in your language easily. Choose a team that can communicate well because it will save a lot of time and effort by making the feedback exchange and discussions faster and easier.

One of the other important factors is to look for a design team that values the client above and beyond the economic aspect of the business. If they believe in an idea, they will collaborate with you from start to end through all phases of business — sustenance to boom!

To increase trustworthiness in the collaboration, they maintain transparency with the clients in every phase of business. They collaborate with the clients as their design and growth partner.

8. They can help in product management

They could be a focused UX design team but that doesn’t stop them from guiding their clients in product development.

If they have in-house development and a QA team, they can make the design-to-development process even faster. They deliver designs with guidelines for developers and QA so that a pixel-perfect product can be developed. They ensure that the user experience stays consistent with the design.

Ending note

UX design enhances the value of the product by providing the best experience from the point of usability, feasibility, viability, and desirability. A good design partner should guide you through this journey of UX design and provide you strategic consultation on ideation, designing to shipping the digital product.

Make sure you don’t find a UX vendor but find a UX partner that collaborates with you like your design and growth partner in business.

Collaborate with a design team that believes in your business from day one. They must be able to share your vision to scale your product as well as the business.