Designers are not just those who bring life to your ideas but they are the real problem solvers who simplify your complex business concepts and put them across in a minimalist way to appeal to your audience. Hiring a designer or finding a UX design agency can be tedious for an organization. However, you cannot ignore the fact that finding the right user experience designer for your website or product is crucial. Whether you're looking for a product designer or a web designer, you need to consider a specific skillset and mindset to ace the game.
Let us suppose that a great UX Design results from carefully arranging information. Consequently, a good UX Designer is someone who has carefully compiled all of the information they need to understand the needs of both user and the brand. The most appropriate UX solution will emerge from this thorough understanding of needs.
Here are seven tips on how to choose a web designer for your UX design agency.
Check their previous design projects
A work portfolio can be the best deciding factor in understanding the projects the potential designer has worked on previously. It gives a clear idea about the designer's forte and comfort zone. While hiring, you should also let the design pass through a comfort zone test by asking them to complete an entirely different thing as an assignment. This practice will be quite helpful in checking the mindset of a candidate.
Ask design-specific questions
While interviewing a designer, one should ask questions about navigation, colour palate and visual hierarchy to determine the potential designer's strategic thinking. You can never go wrong when you ask narrow questions, as it brings clarity to your thoughts on why you're hiring and what you want to close the requirement.
Collaboration is essential. Test designers on this!
You can simply do that by arranging a whiteboard session before hiring your potential designers. Whiteboard and micro sessions are best to judge the problem-solving ability of any potential candidate. Designers should inculcate this mindset and reflect on their work. In the whiteboard session, designers can showcase their ideas, thinking, and information flow. The way designers respond to your negative feedback and how they improve the design to meet your business goals are two critical aspects of hiring.
Take a look at their tool stack
Designers with expert knowledge to work on tools like Figma, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Colors, Adobe XD, and many more are the best people you can rely on for your web project. A great design process will demand prototyping, wire framing, collaboration and successful development hand-off. If your hired designer could handle this process using tools, then it's a win-win situation for your web project. Tools give you amazing functionalities, and if you have a designer who is a pro at these tools, you can save a lot of time on your project timelines effectively.
Ask for references and testimonials
There's a power in reviews; when designers are great at their job, they get acknowledged for it. When finding the perfect designer for your project, remember to ask for references and testimonials if they have any. Such things help you to make a better choice. You can also talk to their previous clients to get their feedback. References are helpful to a great extent.
Understanding of user personas
Designers can only deliver what your target audience wants to see if they understand your user personas. You should check their understanding level by observing their information architecture skills. Understanding is the key when you're working with people from the creative industry. Their understanding of your products or services can help you convert many customers through your intuitive design language. Your brand will become more relevant if your designers know the personas really well. A hypothetical use case and asking the designer to work on its user story mapping can also help you find the one.
Design thinking approach
As you're evaluating the designers, you must consider their design thinking approach toward your web project. According to Forrester Research, design-led firms consciously put the customer first, with 46% of design leaders citing an emotional bond with customers as a defining characteristic of advanced design practice. Not just this, based on a survey conducted by Adobe, companies that foster creativity enjoy a 1.5 times more significant market share.
Bottom line
Before looking out for a designer for your UX design agency, make sure you define your project needs, business objectives, budget and design scope to avoid hassle and delay in the process. Once you have figured these out, reach out to your designer through email or call with a brief and clearly answer their questions about your web project goals. Several online websites could help you find the missing piece or the driving force behind your web project.
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