About a decade ago, investing in UX (user experience) design gave businesses a commanding edge over the competition. But today, designing the perfect user experience for your audience is a business fundamental and contributes directly to your business’s bottom line. According to data by Forrester Research, UX design alone can increase customer conversion by a whopping 400%.
There are many UX designers and agencies out there today. While this gives you many options to choose from, it also increases your chances of hiring unworthy or unprofessional design partners. No matter how good a UI UX design agency claims to be, you need a partner that can help you see a higher ROI and improved customer experience.
If you consider a few specific factors, you can make a more informed decision and choose a reputable, trusted partner with the experience, expertise, and tools to take your business to the next level.
How to Choose the Right UI/ UX Design Agency:
Identify your goals:
Before looking at what you want from your UX design partner, recognize what you want from your business. You could go through the best designers and reject them simply because you don’t understand your business objectives and expectations. Additionally, it is ineffective if you merely copy what other brands or businesses are doing. All you can see is a single action of theirs and not their long-term business goals or benchmarks. This means you shouldn’t base your business objectives and expectations on guidelines generically posted on the internet. If you do so, you might find a good UX agency that isn’t well-suited for your business goals.
To hire a UI UX design agency that will meet your needs, establish distinct objectives and evaluate agencies on them. Brainstorm with your team to identify objectives and the expectations you have from your UI/UX partner.
Evaluate the Critical Factors:
Some factors are more important than others. Here’s what you should evaluate first:
The team:
Check whether the UI UX design agency you shortlisted has a fully functional team that can carry out and implement research, data architecture, interactive design, functionality, prototyping and front, and backend development. You should ensure they provide a strong distinction between UI design, user experience, and overall development. If you are looking at an agency that has one person dealing with more than one of these tasks, you are not working with a specialized agency.
You should also look at the developer to designer ratio. Design-focused agencies have more designers than developers, while you’ll find more software engineers and developers in development-focused agencies.
Delivering a POC (Proof of Concept):
To confirm whether the agency you like is legit, you should ask for proof of concept. This is the agency’s chance to prove its process effectiveness and skills. It is also your chance to evaluate if they understand your business needs or not.
Insight generation:
Is a UI UX design agency giving you a standard solution or proposal, or is it specially customized for your business and enterprise requirements. You want a partner that is proactive enough to ask the right questions and take initiative.
Flexibility:
Credible UX agencies know when they should be rigid and when they can afford flexibility or agility without impacting the final output. They should be able to implement flexibility in their processes as and when the need arises and implement feedback and changes in costs, scope and timing.
Business processes:
There’s flexibility, and then there’s a lack of planning. A reputed UI UX design agency knows the difference between the two and follows the former. They implement proven effective UX processes that can be modified whenever required. Request them to explain their processes and make sure you ask as many questions as needed.
Sales team:
When you are working on a project, it’s more effective to work closely with the development and design teams rather than just the sales team. This will help you avoid discrepancies in the delivered output.
See their regular clients:
If a company has repeat customers and repeated business from a single client, it’s a good sign. This means clients have chosen to work with them multiple times because they have had a positive experience. Look at as many references and reviews as possible.
Following such a strategic route to evaluate a UI UX design company will help you analyze your future partners more closely and efficiently and give you the best output possible.
