Scale-Up Your UX Design
As daily business interactions are increasingly conducted digitally, the need for exceptional user experience design is crucial as this also has a clear impact on a company’s bottom line. According to a study from Forrester Research, a seamless UX design can result in conversion rates up to 400%.
UX design is the process of creating products that provide meaningful and valuable experiences for users. More businesses realize that delivering an optimal user experience is integral to achieving success in the marketplace.
Some companies already have a UX design team in place, but the workload exceeds what the team can handle, or they have an internal skills gap. Therefore, many choose to outsource UX design in order to create the best possible experience for the user.
Hiring an external UX design company with the knowledge and experience to fulfill their needs is an excellent solution. Here are five reasons to consider outsourcing UX design.
1. Stay Current with Industry Trends
UX design is constantly changing as new trends emerge. Frameworks like Angular, Vue, and React are continuously evolving. It requires a lot of effort and time to ensure that an internal team is trained and up-to-date on the latest UX trends.
Outsourcing allows businesses to rely on an external team to keep up with crucial UX trends, such as voice interface, unique illustrations, and next-level animation. Unless a business specializes in these areas, there’s no need for them to spend time worrying about them.
Accordingly, companies that do not have a UX specialist can simply outsource the entire process. Companies that do have a small (or one-person) UX team can add the skills they need through staff augmentation to complete the UX job.
2. Access to Expertise and Creativity
Working with an outsourced team allows companies to consult with a large pool of individuals that specialize in UX. These companies gain access to a multidisciplinary group that shares extensive knowledge and experience and has worked across a wide breadth of projects.
An outside team can also offer a more creative mindset. Designers hired internally are often asked to create an excellent user experience without changing what the company has already built. From a designer’s point of view, this can be extremely difficult.
An outsourced UX team can maintain the creative aspect of the project but also add in expertise. An outside team can see what needs to change and why because they have distance from the project and do not get too set on ideas.
There is also the opportunity to learn a lot by working with an external UX team. Businesses can leverage their established processes and best practices and apply them to their own company, or they can refine and adapt them to suit their needs better.
3. Get Objective Insights
Receiving an external, objective perspective when it comes to UX design is another reason to outsource. Sometimes, a fresh pair of eyes helps when a team is too familiar with a project and can’t seem to find a solution. Projects hit snags all the time, and in some cases, all it takes is a new viewpoint to get things moving along again.
An experienced UX partner can reveal new ideas and information that companies can take advantage of to help their own processes.
They can also act as a buffer for internal teams rife with corporate dynamics. When objective assessments from a third-party expert align with internal team members’ outlooks, this makes it easier to get full agreement on what the next steps should be.
4. Focus on Core Competencies
When UX isn’t already an integral part of the business, it’s a difficult task to undertake.
Hiring a UX designer is challenging as it’s a broad field with numerous specialties. Interaction design, visual design, user research, prototyping, and typography are all different roles companies may encounter when searching for UX talent. UX design also requires a high level of technical knowledge, coding, and other software-related skills.
Outsourcing can save companies a tremendous amount of time and headache, allowing the team to focus on other key areas of their business. It can take years to develop a team with the necessary skills and processes, but outsourcing to an experienced UX team that can deliver quick solutions is often a faster, more efficient approach.
5. Increase Scalability
In UX, workloads tend to fluctuate. As a project begins, there’s typically a lot of work, which then decreases to more of a quality control role until product release. It’s tough to scale an internal team when the workload isn’t consistent.
Companies may initially hire too few people or too many people later down the road. A major reason to outsource UX is that external teams can quickly adapt to the fluctuating workload and even shift in expertise when necessary. Companies will not have to worry about making the mistake of under-hiring or over-hiring a UX design team.
There are a number of reasons for businesses to outsource their UX design. While outsourcing saves on overall costs, it’s important to consider the long-term value that it can provide. Companies should look for an agency whose UX process focuses on thorough research, information architecture and wireframes, user testing, visual product appeal, front end code development, and integration support for a world-class UX design.
