Business growth depends on many factors, and one of the most crucial ones is the quality of your products.
But when you’re battling against hefty overhead costs, a strained workforce, and strict project time frames, quality assurance becomes harder.
So, how do you relieve your business’s financial burden and internal team’s workload while maintaining your user-centric approach to design?
You look into user experience design outsourcing. What’s more, our guide is a great place to start your outsourcing research.
Today, we’ll discuss what UX outsourcing is, why you should consider outsourcing your designs, and how to go about it.
What Is Outsourcing in UX/UI Design?
User experience outsourcing may sound like a complicated part of the design process, but it’s more straightforward than it sounds.
Outsourcing simply refers to the practice of hiring third parties to complete tasks or provide services for your business.
So, through the lens of UI/UX design, outsourcing relates to the hiring of external designers for specific design projects.
If you already have a strong design team, you may not immediately recognize the benefits of outsourcing your design projects.
But when it comes to utilizing a fresh perspective to help you refine your designs, the benefits become much clearer.
Why Outsource UX Design?
As we said, if you already have a design team helping you build digital products, outsourcing may seem unnecessary.
So, why outsource UX designs at all? Below, we’ve compiled a list of reasons that will answer that question.
1. Untapped Expertise
The most prominent advantage of outsourcing your UX design is the access you’ll have to highly skilled UX designers.
You can rely on an external team/agency of designers to have a wide range of experience and expertise. Why? Because these designers are specialists who keep up with modern design trends and technologies.
As a result, these external designers can fill in knowledge/skill gaps in your in-house team with their creative solutions.
Furthermore, external design teams often have cross-industry skills, which can prove valuable when it comes to knowledge transfers.
2. Quicker Product Launches
Your in-house team deals with the nearly constant pressure of managing multiple tasks and projects. With that in mind, it’s not surprising that your team’s multiple commitments can slow down one project’s UX design process.
Outsourcing your projects to third-party designers means that you’re actually speeding up the design process.
External designers will focus solely on the project you hire them for, resulting in the quicker production of actionable deliverables.
Additionally, outsourced designers will see your project through its initial discovery phase to its launch. Ultimately, you won’t just be able to build products quickly; you can rest assured that they are of high quality.
3. Cost Efficiency
It may seem counterintuitive to think that hiring an external team of designers is a money-saving technique, but it is.
Think of it like this – there’s a lot more to financially maintaining your in-house team than paying their salaries. You also need to accommodate other expenses like employee benefits, insurance, utilities, and office supplies.
With outsourcing, you no longer have to worry about juggling the majority of such overhead costs.
In fact, according to MicroSourcing, nearly 60% of businesses outsource to save on unnecessary expenditures.
4. Time Efficiency
Your financial burdens aren’t the only thing that outsourcing can relieve; outsourcing can also alleviate your time pressures.
While your third-party specialists focus on your project’s UX/UI design, you can focus your efforts on other business aspects. These aspects can include things like sales and marketing.
In other words, by relying on outsourced designers, you can dedicate more time and resources to increasing your conversation rates.
What Aspects of UX Can You Actually Outsource?
Now that you have a better understanding of the benefits of outsourcing, you need to know what you can outsource.
After all, to get the most out of your external team, you need to know which tasks you can delegate.
Below, we’ve listed some popular areas of UX/UI design that you can outsource effectively.
- Interaction design: Interaction design focuses on the quality of the interactions between the product and the user. By outsourcing these tasks, you entrust your third-party designers to optimize the functionality and navigation of your product’s user interface.
- Visual design: Visual design refers to the visual appeal of your user interfaces. Outsourcing visual design tasks means working with specialists to create aesthetic products that evoke meaningful emotional responses.
- UX research: User research is an incredibly important aspect of UX design, and for that reason, it is one aspect you can definitely outsource. Whether you need help conducting user testing or creating user personas, you can rely on outsourced UX specialists.
- Prototypes & wireframes: Prototypes and wireframes are the foundational building blocks of every digital product. Your external team can create, test, and iterate your prototypes and wireframes for you. As a result, you’ll be able to reach a user-centric finalized product much quicker.
How To Outsource UX Design
From the previous section, you have an idea about which aspects of your projects you can outsource. Now, it’s time to get to the brass tacks – how to outsource UX design projects.
Below, we’ve provided step-by-step instructions that will help you find the perfect UX agency to outsource to.
1. Clarifying Your Goals
It may seem like an obvious first task, but clarifying your goals is crucial and yet often a disregarded step.
If you don’t clarify your goals prior to hiring an external team, you’ll find that communication becomes so much harder. So, it’s time for thorough introspection.
Brainstorm and take note of the following aspects of your project:
- Your target users
- Your target users’ problems that you’re aiming to solve with your product
- Your business’s goals
- The key components and value proposition of your product
- Your project’s timeline
- Your project’s budget
- Your metrics for success
- The brand experience you want your users to have
Clarifying these goals allows you to communicate them, making it easier to unify your internal and external teams.
2. Researching UX Design Agencies
Now, you need to shift your focus to the potential UX design agencies that you’ll work with.
The right agency will depend on your needs, but generally, you should look for design agencies with the following features:
- The necessary technical skills for your project
- A deep understanding of your industry and target demographics
- An extensive portfolio that clearly conveys the designer’s creativity, adaptability, and dedication to high-quality deliverables
- An abundance of reviews/testimonials that reveal what it’s like to work with that specific agency
Tip: Consider looking into Capterra’s User Experience Design Agencies list.
3. Selecting Communication & Collaboration Tools
It’s said that one of the biggest challenges of working with external design teams is maintaining clear communication.
So, it’s crucial that you agree upon the most suitable communication channels and collaboration tools. For instance, you could communicate via Slack and collaborate via Figma.
Whichever tools you pick, it’s a good idea to make sure they allow for scalability and accessibility before implementing them.
Tip: It may be worth establishing a communication schedule so you and your team know when to expect progress updates.
4. Setting & Finalizing Expectations
At this stage, you’re set up to have a successful collaborative experience with your chosen UX design agency.
Now, you just need to clarify your expectations pertaining to the project’s scope, deliverables, milestones, revisions, deadlines, and costs.
Once you and your external team have agreed upon these things, you can put contracts and legal agreements in place. With a fair contract in place that protects both parties, you can start your collaborations with complete peace of mind.
5. Integrating Your Teams
The last thing you’ll want to do is introduce your external team to your internal team.
By doing this as soon as you can, you’ll help your two teams feel more comfortable with one another. This, in turn, will lead to better communication and collaboration in the future.
With everyone in the same space, you can discuss the project in full and address any queries. This is also a good opportunity to introduce any project management or communication tools you intend to implement.
After this meeting, you will be ready to work toward your business’s goals with both your in-house and outsourced teams.
FAQs
Before you finish reading our guide, we’d like to address some queries you may have about UX design outsourcing.
Below, we’ve answered some of our most frequently asked questions on the user experience design outsource process.
- How do I choose the right UX design agency?
Ultimately, the right UX design agency for you will depend primarily on your unique business goals. That said, there are many factors you can consider when finding the right UX design agency, some of which include:
- The agency’s portfolios
- The agency’s value proposition
- Testimonials and social proof from previous partners
- The agency’s methodology and approach to a design project
- The agency’s pricing models
- The agency’s approach to project management
- How the agency facilitates scalability and development
- Why should I consider outsourcing UX design?
You should consider outsourcing your UX design projects if you value flexibility, scalability, efficiency, and minimizing unnecessary costs.
Outsourcing UX projects also gives you access to specialized expertise and advanced technology. All in all, outsourcing is an extremely helpful and more affordable way of creating high-quality, user-centric products.
- What is UX design outsourcing?
UX design outsourcing means working with third-party UX agencies, leveraging a vast talent pool of UX/UI design specialists.
By working with outsourced UX specialists, businesses can offer their user bases high-quality products much more quickly.
User Experience Design Outsourcing: Final Thoughts
Ultimately, this article should help you understand that user-centricity should be the driving force behind your decisions.
Whether you outsource or not, your success depends on how much you prioritize your users’ experiences. Outsourcing is simply a step you can take that can lead to more user-centric products.
But if you really want to refine your users’ experiences with your products, you’ll need other valuable resources. This is where Page Flows enters the fray. It is the host of nearly 7,000 recordings of proven products from immensely successful brands like Google.
We document common but crucial user flows that every designer needs to learn from to create better digital products. From onboarding to general browsing, we have collected successful user flows across dozens of vastly different industries.
Like user experience design outsourcing, we’re here to see you through the entirety of your design projects. Get started today to learn how to become a better designer and create the next must-have products!
