Picking The Right UX Design Agency & UX Consultants for Your Business: A Cheat Sheet

For any business that seeks to reach the targeted audience or market its products, an optimally designed application/interface with superior UX is perhaps the only way to truly connect with them digitally. User Experience or UX is critical in a website, app or product for SMBs (Small and Medium Businesses) and enterprises looking to gain traction among their audience, tackling competition, and expanding their user base. A good UX can often simply mean a product with ease and enjoyability of use.

Industry giants like Amazon, Facebook, and Apple have consistently prioritized superior ergonomic UX designs in their digital products - whether app or website - to suit users leading to better quality products. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO reveals that during their first year, the e-commerce portal invested 100 times more in usability design - a service offered by UX consulting agencies to test how easily a user can interact with a website or product - than marketing. He attributes Amazon’s success to this strategy.  

The question that we explore in this post though, is whether you should go about your UX design internally, or outsource it to a UX design agency. Let's find out.  

The Need for External UX Design Agencies

A user interface offering an optimized UX would be the first semblance of user engagement and retention in an online industry where the organization needs to grab user attention within the first 3 seconds. After all, a great end user experience is what translates into a successful brand in the digital world. A McKinsey & Company Report titled ‘The Business Value of Design’ finds a strong link between the financial performance of any business and its design capabilities. The study further found that organizations that paid attention to their UX design increased their revenues and returns by 2x approximately.  

UX design is an umbrella term for the UI of a website/app/dashboard, the element of navigation, and the transaction ease.  Only a UX design agency experienced and adept to the design task can bring the UX of any interface to perfection. It is, therefore, pertinent for enterprises seeking design-driven growth to not limit themselves to their own ecosystem.

How can an UX Design Agency synergize your product success

Taking the help of a UX consulting and design agency can help businesses create value in numerous ways. Some of them are stated below:

• In order to find a holistic cum ideal design suited to the user expectations of your audience, it is necessary to gather end user insights. Surprisingly, only 50% of the companies conduct user research before generating their first design ideas. Any good UX/UI design agency would begin with a qualitative and quantitative user research before embarking on the actual designing process.
• UX Assessment of your app/website/dashboard is paramount to deliver the intended user experience to your audience. A UX design agency does the task of assessing and identifying the gaps in the existing design capabilities and redesign the interface using the same insights.  
• Evaluating the usability of Digital products determines the ease of interaction on five parameters, namely, effectiveness, efficiency, engagement, ease and error tolerance. Usability Testing is an essential part of the UX design process and a design agency does the job wonderfully well.  Apple Mac’s UI, when tested for usability testing, had to undergo a minor tweak. Post the tweak, the support calls were reduced by 90%.
• UX design isn’t an isolated process. For a digital world that is quickly evolving, it is essential to integrate design with other functions. Cross functional teams serve the purpose of integrating design into other functions of the organization. But cross functional teams are difficult to be built without the help of an external UX agency.
• UX design agencies help validate potential design elements by building prototypes during the design stage such that the organization gets the idea whether the design matches the customers’ needs.

Is your in-house design team optimum?

For all those organizations considering to go ahead with an in-house UX design process, a recently concluded McKinsey study proves quite a bummer. It states that organizations have been actually slow to catch up with several aspects concerning a superior UX design central to optimum user experience:

• 40% of the organizations surveyed weren’t talking or taking feedback from the end users.
• 50% of those surveyed admitted to having no objective way to assess or set targets for their in-house design team.
• Less than 5% of those surveyed said that their leaders were capable of making objective design decisions.
• Only 50% of the organizations conducted any kind of user research before getting on with their first design idea.

This scenario is the direct consequence of senior leaders’ reluctance to divert scarce resources to design functions. Even if there’s a team of designers at hand, the UX design elements cannot be tackled by them alone without solid leadership and optimum resources backing them. The report further iterated that the best businesses should not limit themselves to their own ecosystems. Also, retaining great design talent is a greater task than just assigning a bonus or giving a promotion. UX design is a nuanced process that is distinct from all the other business operations but still requires integration into each one of them. Hiring a UX design agency doesn’t just offset the hassles of nurturing an in-house design talent and getting work done through them, it brings in a broader perspective and access to excellent design tools. It’s time to break the stereotype that you have internal resources and hand over the UX design task to the people who are best at it.  

How to Choose the Right UX Agency for Your Business?

Here are four ways to choose the right UX design agency for your business:

#1 Testimonials and Reviews

Choosing a UX design agency based on the face value can prove disastrous for any SMB seeking to outsource its product development. You could research for a good UX design agency or consulting firm on websites such as Clutch, LinkedIn  Goodfirms, and Awwwards.

Start your search by shortlisting names that operate in your area (if you are looking to collaborate physically) or those UX design firms that are top google searches. Now that you’ve got a head start, it’s time to read about their past performance, credibility, and customer relationship repo by reading testimonials and reviews from sources including:

• Online reviews could be the first step to decanting the good from the ‘supposedly good.’

• LinkedIn is a handy but not highly reliable source for employee reviews and testimonials. However, you can contact the past and present employees and clients of a particular firm to know their experience while working with the agency.

• Several platforms contain info about professional UX designers and software companies, including Awwwards, which regularly holds competitions for professional designers and displays their portfolio and social media links, and Goodfirms, an extensive resource base containing info about UX design agencies and consulting firms and their corresponding testimonials.

• Research Organizations like Clutch have an entire list of UX design companies along with their A to Z info, testimonials and reviews.

• The UX design agency’s website could be a demo in itself. Scroll through the website to get an idea of what the design agency will truly have to offer.

• A walkover through their social media profiles would give insights into how the company positions itself as a brand and maintains its PR image.  

#2 Studying Portfolios and Experience

Organizations should remember that a UX design agency needs to be evaluated beyond the fundamental parameter of how they design? What do they charge? How long do they take to build a product from scratch?

Ample care should be allotted to questions such as - Does the design agency understand the vision and idea behind the concept? Are their designs scalable, user-friendly, and to your liking, and would be able to generate required leads and user traction? And so on.

All these questions find their answers in the next step towards choosing the right UX design agency for your SMB/enterprise, i.e., studying portfolios and noting their past experience in the field. The UX design agency’s website could be the starting point for the assessment drill. It is better to check when the website was launched and has been active since. Some significant points to look for in a portfolio include :

• Design portfolios consisting of live websites provide a peek-a-boo into the agency’s design philosophy. If a UX design agency still uses images in their portfolio, be wary - there might be a possibility that the design isn’t UX optimized.

• An agency should display both aspects of their projects - the clients they worked with and the quality of work they created. A transparent portfolio could act as an excellent trust-building initiator.

• Certain UX design agencies follow specific themes or serve specific niches when designing websites and applications. It is better to double-check with the agency if the product you are seeking to get built is within their scope.

• Research is an essential aspect of UX design, and design agencies should make it a point to mention their research methodologies within their portfolios. A UX company cannot design a user-friendly product that appears on google top searches without researching the user base and industry metrics related to the enterprise/SMB they are serving.  

#3 Directing Concerns and Queries Directly to the Agency

Once you have a list of shortlisted candidates ready, it’s time to start contacting the UX design agencies to discuss the project finally. But before you start asking your queries, take note of what kind of questions the agency puts forth. The questions asked will indicate the agency’s expertise and experience in its field and the direction and interest it will take concerning your project.

Here’s a list of a few pointers that need to be addressed during the Q&A session:

• The UX agency’s experience regarding user research and testing, UX audits and usability studies, mockup and prototype design, personas reports, and other such benchmarks.

• The frequency of communication the design agency has with its client. And whether the client will be regularly updated about the project’s status.

• The calendar for your project, including the date of initiation of the work around the project, the duration needed, weekly work schedule, and estimated date of launch of the project such as an app or a website.  

• The pricing model, the services offered, and the team that will work on the product or project. Along with the main team, the provision of an on-staff manager and a separate quality assurance department.  

#4 Demo/Trial Run

Besides all the primary research and analysis of the past performance and experience of the UX design agency, an actual demo or test task can give deeper insights into what the SMBs/enterprises can expect from their UX design agency. Reciprocally, the design agency can get familiar with the task that needs to be done and what kind of expectations are to be met.

Ask the UX design agency to solve a test task like fixing your website to assess their caliber. Once the trial run is complete, a clear idea emerges on whether to continue and sign the contract, or repeat the process all over again with another design agency.

Looking for the best UX design agency? Head over to Thence for the best-in-class UX design and engineering for your digital products.    

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