If you’re developing a digital product, hiring an in-house design team might not be cost-efficient. Instead, it’ll be much easier for you to find a UX/UI designer who will take care of all the necessary processes in order to provide you with a fully functional product. However, finding a good freelance designer or a professional UX/UI design agency could become a messy endeavor, but this post will give you some ideas that might help you hire the designer of your dreams.
How to Find a Good UX/UI Designer
The first step to hiring a professional designer is to know where to find them. Here are a couple of strategies that you can use to hire the next member for your team.
By Acquaintance
If a person works in the industry, then sooner or later they will begin to acquire contacts and meet people. Usually, the person you find through friends is better than a dozen people from the Internet. There are many great pros who do not have a public portfolio but work in large companies on complex product tasks.
Portfolio Platforms
You can look at Behance and Dribbble, but the downside of such sites is that it is difficult to evaluate human thinking. It is good when, in addition to beautiful pictures, there is a description of the problem in the work; this helps to evaluate not only the level of design but also the approach to the solution. However, if you like the portfolio, you can always chat with the person and decide whether or not you want to invite them to a job interview.
Blogs
Go to Medium and you will immediately be swooshed away by the stream of design consciousness. By choosing an author and reading several of their articles, you can understand their logic and their level of skills and experience.
If everything is okay in that regard, then you can safely follow the link to the portfolio, which is usually indicated in the profile. If everything is fine with the portfolio, then you can schedule a call to communicate in person.
What to do Next
Once you have selected professionals with the most interesting profiles for the job interview, it’s time to meet them in person. Even if your company is completely remote, schedule a video call at the very least. People are very different in person, and the time spent on one-on-one communication is definitely valuable. However, a job interview is not enough to fully evaluate the level of professionalism. So, how can you do it? There are two ways:
Test Task
The easiest way to filter out candidates is to give them a test task. No matter how beautiful a portfolio might be, you still need to see what they can do on the spot. Given that a UX/UI designer is such a creative position, this step is especially important.
The test task should be such that it takes a person no more than a couple of hours to complete. Otherwise the conversion decreases – people do not want to spend three days on a test task they are not paid for.
Next, be sure to base your task in real-life cases. For example, you can give a person an already-resolved case from your company’s portfolio. This will allow you to understand whether a person can join the process while also identifying their problem-solving skills. On the other hand, it will give the candidate an understanding of what kind of problems they will have to work on if hired.
Portfolio
If the resume and portfolio only contain beautiful pictures, this is not a good sign. If a person did not bring anything to the release, then even with the most complex interfaces they are more likely to be a junior. Bringing the task to release is not the same as drawing twenty layouts. In reality, it can turn out that half of what is drawn on the mock-ups do not correspond to how it actually works because there are technical, user, and product restrictions. However, if the portfolio contains completed projects, a person already has an understanding of how real projects function. Even if they were not the only designer working on the project, they have the relevant experience.
Summing Up
Nowadays, finding a good UX/UI designer is hard because there are so many candidates to choose from. Whether you will be able to find your dream designer or UX/UI team all depends on how much work you put into the selection procedure, prepare the test tasks, and study hundreds of portfolios.