Why Should You Hire Dedicated Designers Than Going For A Fixed-Bucket Model?
- UI/UX
- February 22, 2023
We all know the impact of well-thought-out, researched, and designed logos, websites, and digital graphics, which help to create a powerful brand image and elevate its reputation across the market. And to craft attractive, trend-setting designs, it requires resources, time, and finance.
A call for hiring professional designers! If you go for hiring designers for in-house, it will take a lot of time and effort.
But what if you don’t have much time in the buffer and much finance in your budget to pay in one go?
Then a professional designer with certain years of matching experience working remotely dedicatedly under a flexible engagement model is exactly what you need!
Here, in this blog, we are going to reveal everything about the perks, processes, and mistakes to avoid when hiring dedicated designers for your mission-critical product design project.
But before we deep dive into the topic, let’s first understand what leads businesses, especially startups, to hire a dedicated team.
Challenges You May Face As A Startup When Hiring Designers
As a startup, you may face many challenges and pressures when starting a new venture with software product development. However, you can deal with this pressure by hiring the best-fit resource or outsourcing agency to convert your out-of-the-world idea into a full-fledged business venture.
Alert for challenges on the way!
Finding the right-fit talent
The question is, “How can a business that has just started out can find the right-fit talent quickly for your project?” This challenge is a major one, especially for non-tech founders. The thing is, they need talented designers who can not just fit well in the company culture and criteria but also in the limited pay scale compared to other organizations.
Intense Market Competition for Talent
The design team is nowadays an on-demand skill, especially in competitive industries. And to get the highly skilled one on-boarded on their team, startups have to struggle to match with the large enterprises offering interesting pay scales.
Limited Budget
Hiring designers with exceptional skills can be costly. And as the startups may have to focus on other investment areas along with it, they might face budget constraints.
Locating Local Talent
It’s not necessary that businesses located in any corner of the world can easily find the right-fit designer in their locality. Sometimes, they may have to approach designers who reside far away from the company location. Hence, they have to outsource it, which is costly, especially when outsourcing the design project to an agency based out of other cities, provinces, countries, or regions.
Evaluating Portfolios
Entrepreneurs who are not familiar with design may struggle to evaluate the designer portfolios. This eventually leads to challenges in filtering out the right-skilled talent meeting their design project requirements.
Remote Design Team Management
It is obvious that when startups don’t find the right-match designer as per their requirements, they may have to opt for the remote hiring option. When hiring remote talents from a different region, there are chances for them to face communication & collaboration challenges due to time zone differences.
Even with these challenges, a dedicated hiring model brings a ray of hope for startups. It solves their time-zone flexibility, cost-effectiveness, right-time delivery, and many other challenges.
What Does The Term Dedicated Design Team Hiring Model Mean?
The dedicated hiring model is the most convenient model for clients to pay as they go and get the outcome quickly and effectively and for developers to get the work done on time, providing dedicated support according to the client’s time zone.
In other words, it is a team model of dedicated designers with one goal, which is to design creative digital products for a single customer dedicatedly while ensuring continuous, effective communication. It is indeed an effective solution for startups and small businesses; the reason is less overhead and cost-effectiveness. However, large enterprises can also opt for it to benefit with less overhead.
What clients love about this model is that they and designers work closely on their project like one team from start to finish, which results in outstanding output, proving success for both parties.
Additionally, this model goes beyond satisfactory results as it helps businesses to meet their problems while getting best-fit solutions.
The best thing about this model is that business representatives can directly get in touch with the designers and developers, which nearly eliminates communication gaps and gets their hands on the replica of their imaginary app.
What Kind of Businesses Can Benefit the Most From The Dedicated Designer Hiring Model?
Well, there are no selected businesses or industries that can only leverage a dedicated designer hiring model to achieve business success. In fact, many businesses across a range of industries have augmented their staff by hiring remote dedicated talents in design to elevate their brand reputation.
To go in some depth, the below-listed industries and business types can benefit the most from this model, as mentioned:
Startups
As startups may or may not have a big budget to employ an entire professional team of designers, they can hire dedicated designers on hourly pricing models to work on their projects in small chunks of tasks.
This way, they can keep track of the record of the project process, review each and every deliverable, and work together like one team to build an unfailing brand identity with a stronger digital presence.
E-commerce
Many online retailers focused on diverse industry-based marketplaces often hire dedicated UI/UX designers to create attractive, easy-navigating, user-friendly websites, along with crafting packaging design and marketing campaign posts.
Technology
Though most tech companies have their in-house team of designers. However, some focused on areas like cybersecurity, AI/ML, cloud, DevOps, etc., might not have designers in their team. So, they hire dedicated designers to create and improve the user experience of their digital products.
Healthcare
Post-pandemic situation, the healthcare sector has started to invest in IT solutions with full force. The investment areas include educational sites, telemedicine, hospital management systems, and many healthcare app development ideas.
So, many hospitals with budget and time constraints to launch their online services quickly have hired dedicated designers to give a progressive and user-friendly touch to their mission-critical healthcare apps.
Game Companies
Some game companies do choose to hire a dedicated designer – they call – dedicated game artists rather than entirely outsourcing a game design project to design game art, infuse motion graphics, 2D and 3D characters, etc. while maintaining continuous, effective communication with game artists to bring their imagination into reality.
As said earlier, any size of business from any industry can hire dedicated UI/UX designers. However, their decision drivers for this include factors like the need to improve brand image, efficiency enhancement requirements, and budget.
When deciding this, many industry experts suggest going for a professional, creative design studio to hire dedicated resources.
Why Trust Professional, Creative Design Studio to Hire Dedicated Designers For Your Project?
As a customer of any creative design studio, you may think of and continuously analyse the benefits of working with a company via an engagement model – a dedicated team model. For a company, it is a priority to utilize dedicated resources effectively to provide exactly what clients need.
Moreover, a dedicated design team from a professional company offers total creative control of the design and smoother processes to deliver what you need. So, you don’t have to worry about anything being left out.
Apart from that, you can get the following benefits from a company providing dedicated designer hiring services.
Have A Control on Hiring Dedicated UI/UX Designers
Well, businesses always have their list of requirements for developing their digital products and the skill sets they want to hire to be utilized for the project. This is necessary to prepare before reaching out to any IT firm to hire dedicated designers.
In the traditional fixed-bucket model, businesses used to hire by looking at the entire portfolio of the IT company they might be interested in employing. In this case, clients might not have an idea of who’s working on their project due to tons of dependencies aligned, including the project manager, tech leader, team leader, and then the resource.
But in the case of dedicated designer hiring, clients have the privilege to go through a pool of profiles of designers with their individual design portfolios, select particulars to take interviews with, and then hire the one who matches up with their requirements. Here, the profiles could include designers with a range of industrial experience and design expertise.
In simple terms, the hiring pool could include professional designers from mid-level experienced to expert-level designers.
Goal Oriented Designers
Indeed, it is the foremost benefit you get by hiring dedicated UI/UX designers from a creative design studio. These resources are goal-oriented and can significantly help businesses to get focused, result-driven design solutions.
The dedicated design team understands what that particular business needs and creates a design by aligning all business objectives, values, and goals.
For instance, goal-oriented dedicated designers help to create branding strategies with both businesses and even target audiences that can resonate. Also, the focus given on business value propositions helps to set a stronger brand reputation. And this strategy is further used to design posts for marketing and sales campaigns resulting in better conversions.
Additionally, a dedicated team of designers knows how to work within strict constraints, like timeline, budget, and branding guidelines, which satisfies both the business and target audience.
In short, they have the expertise to create a pipeline of tasks based on priority and deliver high-quality work that exceeds expectations.
Flexible Resources Who Can Adjust To Your Needs
The dedicated design team is highly popular amongst businesses due to enablement to flexibility and designers’ adeptness to meet specific needs. They take an interest in listening to client’s requirements, understand their objectives, and incorporate all studies to design solutions accordingly.
When the design is the concern, there’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all solution. Therefore, companies following this design approach to meet clients’ ever-evolving needs always find success.
Clear Communication, Smoother Process, and Effective Design Project Management
The most convincing benefit of hiring dedicated designers is the time-zone-aligned meetings to ensure clear communication as per the client’s time and convenience.
In other words, the UI/UX design company working with this model has a pool of dedicated designers working particular to their time zone, which is given to the client to further conduct the hiring process.
Once the resource is hired, they are aligned to work according to that client’s time zone. So, the client doesn’t have to make further adjustments or face any inconveniences to match up with the talent’s time zone. Instead, their dedicated designer makes adjustments to match up with the client’s time zone to have meetings or even work if agreed.
This dedication towards time-zone alignment helps designers to clear their all doubts about project needs and get proper feedback on their progress. Eventually, this boosts their productivity and lets them deliver the best-class design solution quickly and efficiently.
Roles and Responsibilities Your Dedicated UI/UX Designer Would Handle
Normally, dedicated UI/UX designers handle a similar set of roles and responsibilities that any other professional designer would. The only difference that adds up in this responsibility is the dedication towards the project requirement and direct communication with the client could be another one – breaking the silos.
- Have the initial discussion with the client to learn about the project requirements;
- Understand the design requirements and target audience, conduct the competitor market research to find out the best UI/UX design solution that is being offered, and do brainstorming to come up with the design solution;
- Discuss the derived solution with the client to take the approval to proceed further;
- Create user personas, which portray the potential user profile covering user pain points and their needs;
- Creating design guidelines and a design system that will be followed further throughout the app interface design;
- Reviewing designs and ensuring that they meet the business standards;
- Conduct user testing to know the way users interact with the system, to make it a user-centric design;
- Identify, mark, and eliminate the “red routes” that can mislead or make the user journey difficult in the app;
- Create wireframes and engaging prototypes that enable clients to see how the digital product will look after it is developed completely.
- Communicate with clients to update them about the design progress, take and consider their feedback, and implement those in design to meet the expectation;
- Work side-by-side with developers and guide them about design flow and interaction points.
Okay, now, you know so many things about your dedicated designers, but there comes one question that rings a bell. And this is how and where to find such dedicated developers who can help you elevate your digital business reputation.
Don’t worry! We are going to discuss it all in the upcoming section. ?
How Do You Evaluate and Hire The Right-Match Dedicated Designer For Your Mission-Critical Design Project?
The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption of the dedicated hire model as businesses look for ways to manage their workforce more effectively in the new reality of remote work.
As many IT companies offer a dedicated hiring model as a core part of their service, it is considerable having some confusion when hiring a dedicated designer who is reliable and will benefit your business. Hence, follow the below-mentioned best practices to evaluate the right-skilled designer who can meet your design project requirements efficiently.
Evaluate the Designer’s Portfolio
As you’re very specific about hiring a dedicated UI/UX designer with a particular skill set, you must be evaluating many resource profiles. But how should you evaluate the portfolio of a UI/UX designer? Let’s know the steps:
- Analyze Cases In Their Portfolio
Well, the attractiveness of the designer portfolio is something key element that catches your attention at first. But that’s not the only parameter you should consider when hiring a dedicated UI/UX designer to add value to your digital business presence.
To truly assess their skills and experience, you should also look for project briefs, their specific role in the project, and the design decisions they made.
When reviewing the portfolio, you should also ask about which aspects of the design were solely their own and which came from the client’s or other fellow designers’ end. This information can give you a better understanding of the designer’s level of creativity, independence, and experience in UX/UI design.
- Inspect the UI Part
Good, eye-pleasing design aesthetics is something that must be the strength of UI/UX designers. And to get that on the page, every designer must have sound knowledge of many design and visual aspects, including the design theme selection, color theory and appealing color combinations, typography, UI trend, the placement of important design elements, etc.
So, when hiring your UI/UX designer who you’re going to add to your dedicated design team, you must evaluate them with all these skills by asking related questions.
- Find Their Logic And Reasoning In Their Designs
After the UI evaluation – the attractive part, knowing the logic behind each and every design and placement is necessary. The design UX evaluation includes the type of market and user research done, the logic behind the design asset placement, the color selection, the user testing, etc.
You can try to find these points by applying your reasoning. And you should also interview the UX designer to know their point of view.
Once the designer passes this initial stage of evaluation, the next stage is the personal interview round to know more about the designer.
The Personal Interview Round
Many recruiters also call this round by using the abbreviation – the PI round. You can ask several direct questions and put them in hypothetical situations to test them in all possible ways. The dedicated hiring criteria for the designers and their PI round may include the evaluation of:
- The worth of experience
- Problem-solving skills
- Communication and collaboration skills
- User-centricity in the design process, even with cultural differences
- The creativity and innovation bars in design
- Understanding the visuals
- Leadership qualities
- Handling criticism, taking feedback, and effectiveness to implement them, etc.
And if their skill sets, creativity levels, and pricing structure meet your expectations and budget, then voilà, you’ve got your dedicated UI/UX designer to hire.
The best practices to evaluate and hire UI/UX designers are okay, and almost every business follows, but what about the mistakes that you might make.
That’s correct! The next step will take you to the possible mistakes you might make when hiring dedicated designers.
Common Mistakes to Avoid When Hiring Dedicated Designers
It is totally understandable that you’re opting for this dedicated hiring model due to the many benefits we’ve discussed above. With seeing so many benefits, there might be chances to expect too much and make decisions. This decision may seem beneficial at the start, but in the long run, it may not.
Hence, mistakes mentioned below to hire dedicated designers, you should ensure to not follow such:
One Designer For Many Job Roles
In order to get the output at a lower cost, many companies go for hiring one dedicated resource who can take all responsibilities to do UI design, UX design, development, and even QA.
Well, you may find such all-rounders, and that also helps in cost saving. But do you think that that candidate will meet your project timeline, and even if does, will the output be satisfactory? Most of us will say no. Onboarding such an all-rounder technical superstar can be a futile decision.
So, the bottom line for this heading is to not go for such multi-talented resources, who have knowledge of the whole IT field, but only enough to dabble around, rather than having expertise in particular, for example, UI/UX design.
To add more, we suggest hiring a professional UI/UX designer, who is an expert in the field and can experiment with design elements to create artistic designs and be with design trends.
Sticking to a Rigid Skill Set
The technology world is a continuously thriving field, in which, with technology updates, the demand for skills also changes. This implies to the design field as well, which paradigm has changed a lot.
So, it is necessary to avoid setting up some rigid hiring criteria for your remote designer and go for the one who holds progressive thinking and design values and is capable of doing critical thinking as a designer.
Though dedicated hiring is to get on-the-spot solutions to your concerning problems, you do want to plan association with them until the project is done and even after that.
Compelled With the Presented Decisive UX Portfolio
When hiring a UI/UX designer, you will definitely evaluate many designers through their portfolios, from which some you would find interesting based on the quantity of UI/UX case studies and the overall look of the design.
But the question is, “Does the filtered-out portfolios just by judging with the number of case studies or attractive designs, make sense?” Definitely not! The thing is, the number of design case studies and just eye-opening design samples have not much to do with the skill and experience of designers.
The judgment should never be passed by seeing a designer’s portfolio with 3-4 case studies, and who knows, these small counts can also have critical thinking, imagination, and creativity engraved.
A well-versed designer has a clear understanding of all design element considerations, from technical design aspects and user-centricity and market trends to dealing with design complexities.
Hence, it is suggested that when assessing the UX portfolio, you must evaluate it by considering many factors, which we have mentioned in the above section, “Evaluate the Designer Portfolio.”
Expecting Too Quick Turnaround Time
The dedicated hiring model does promise quick turnaround time but in comparison to traditional hiring. And many recruiters have this misconception that if a designer has decade-plus years of experience, he/she has a magic wand to finish the task right away. Then it’s totally a work of fiction if you think in such a way.
Even if you find an expert designer for your project, there’s always a threshold to cut the time spent on it in order to deliver the solution quickly. What changes by hiring an expert, is an approach to designing the solution, dealing with design complexities, trying out new possibilities by thinking about all aspects of design, etc.
To ensure a managed collaboration with the designer, when hiring a designer, you must ask the candidate about the time estimation with logical reasons to avoid issues later on.
Hire Dedicated Creative Designers From MindInventory Today!
Indeed, the dedicated designer hiring model is highly beneficial for startups and small-scale businesses that want to scale quickly without adding new employees to the team. Especially the ones that want to hire and onboard remote professional, highly skilled designers and quickly scale up their team cost-effectively.
It also allows businesses to focus on what matters the most and solve it effectively with the help of expert designers. So, when you get too many benefits on your platter with productive results, why not go for it!
Here at MindInventory, we offer a flexible hiring model through which our proficient designers work closely with you to create and deliver design solutions that meet your needs and design standards. Send us your design project requirement, get a pool of designers with matching skill sets, and hire and onboard the right-match UI/UX designer within 2 days!
FAQs on Hire Dedicated Designers
When planning to hire designers and developers, you have to choose one out of three hiring types: freelancers, an in-house team, or an outsourcing design partner offering a managed, dedicated hiring model. When hiring freelancers, you may have the benefit of exploring different skills, but reliability can be a concern. When hiring an in-house team, you can have reliability and total control over a team but can be costly. Lastly, the third option – dedicated hiring meets the levels of conveniences you need and wants in your resource.
Unlike the fixed bucket model, the dedicated designers’ hire model comes with more flexibility. In this model, you not just pay for the hour they spent on your project but also for the value-driven solution they provide with higher efficiency. So, the hiring cost for dedicated designers varies across the country, the company’s pricing model, the expertise level of designers, etc. Contact us now to learn more about our expertise and hourly hiring charges.
There are several benefits to hiring dedicated designers, including cost-effectiveness, flexibility and scalability, access to specialized skills, time-zone alignment, improved project management, better turnaround time, enhanced solution quality, higher market reach, and much more.
