UX is a shortened way of saying User Experience. Every successful business owner understands that their user’s experiences with their brand, website, mobile app, or online store will make or break the connection with that customer.
A negative online experience can make a user feel silly, lost, unimportant, alienated, and slow.
UX is a big deal right now for businesses
that care about delighting their current and future customers with a skill that gets them all the information they need from an intuitive online source.
Finding the right UX designer at an affordable price is required. If you plan to build an online presence that will support your business and generate sales. Finally, you need a great UX designer so your online interfaces will function the way the public expects them to.
Hiring sites like Upwork, Guru, Peopleperhour, and Freelancer may seem like a natural place to look for an inexpensive, yet experienced UX designer. It is possible to have success using those sites if you have a great deal of experience with the platform and have hired there before.
Just remember people working on these sites typically have multiple clients, and managing workflow can be a challenge.
If you’re going to search for a UX designer on a freelancing site, your prospective designers should demonstrate these qualities:
- Can produce creative solutions with limited directives
- Can consistently meet deadlines even though they have multiple clients
- Is willing to work more than they planned to meet a deadline rather than quitting before the job is done
- Can juggle many tasks at once and still produce high-quality work
- Is consistently communicative
Hiring freelancers this way poses a great risk to the business
If the UX designer flakes out, it creates a huge bottleneck in the project. Getting back on track can be stressful and expensive.
High-quality UX designers are easier to find at sites like Toptal.com. Their quality guarantee, low failure rate, and the wide range of pre-screened candidates offer small businesses the safety net they need to feel secure in their choice.
This type of freelancer interfaces with your team from their home office, but works as an integrated member of your staff, for the price of a freelancer. This is an especially compelling option for businesses who may need to hire a full-time designer, but aren’t quite ready to make the jump.
Toptal.com does its own in-house evaluation of their freelancers for design skills, integrity, and communication skills. This goes a long way towards decreasing the potential failure rate of a UX design project.
Other freelancing sites with a great reputation for top UX design talent including
Envato Studio and Hired.
If you don’t like the idea of hiring a remote worker you’ve never met in person, a simple networking exercise may bring you the UX designer you need.
Ask around on LinkedIn, pose the question inside any industry-specific Facebook groups you participate in, and talk to your employees to find out if they know anyone with UX design skills that may be willing to help.
When you find a UX designer and feel confident that you’ve made the right choice
ask them to do a small test project to assess their skill-set as it applies to your specific business.
Because, do expect to pay $100+ per hour for a good, experienced, and trustworthy designer. The acquisition of real talent for less is great, but it’s also lucky.
The price of poor UX design work is much higher. The negative effects of lost customers, sacrificing new business to competitors, and a degraded reputation is difficult. There’s also a possibility of not recover from a poor design if left alone.
Due to larger projects, consider hiring more than one designer and asking them to collaborate. The distribution of workload will help your team feel supported, the project is less likely to go off track with the natural accountability that grows within a team.
Conclusion
Good UX design is crucial to the success of a company’s web presence. So remember, without it, you won’t be seen or heard by the right people.
