Introduction
Partnering with a UX agency to get your UX work done can be a daunting task and with a plethora of agencies with different expertise, deciding on the right agency can be taxing. Here is a cheat sheet of how to choose a UX design agency and what to look for in an agency Vis-à-vis you requirement, time lines and budget. This blog talks about how to choose a UX design agency?
Cheat Sheet to choose a UX Design Agency
Well to start of let me share some statistics about the importance of UI/UX.
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Jeff Bezos invested 100X more into customer experience than advertising during the first year of Amazon.
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AirBnB’s Mike Gebbia credits UX with taking the company to $10 billion.
Now let us look at a typical journey of how a product is made; Products that are envisioned by techies are made keeping technology and development in mind and this is the most incorrect way to approach a product. The user journey and the user experience while using the product are far more important, this is true for a simple reason that the end user has nothing to do with the complexities of the technology used in making the product. All that matters to the user is his objective that needs to be fulfilled, this objective that we are talking about is nothing else but the revenue that the product generates.
The benefits of a good UX can be enlisted under two broad categories.
Conversational Interfaces:
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Development Cost &
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Sales/Revenue
Development: Good UX will save you considerable costs on development, this is achieved in several ways, mainly by reducing the number of screens, lesser time for the product to reach the market and lower cost on training and support.
Sale/Revenue: The biggest impact of a neatly designed product is higher task success rate for the user, better comprehension of information, reduced cognitive load, better usability & intuitive UI, all this results in customer delight and user retention, this means more sales and a continuous inflow of revenue.
Now that we have established the importance of UI/UX, let’s look at what to look in a UX Agency.
Agencies bring in a lot of experience and fresh perspective, they are highly focused on how a user perceives a product and can think from the user retention point of view.
The UX agency’s work can be categorized in the following stages.
- Strategy: Here the agency will understand your business objectives, product vision, road map, priorities/timelines and finally the desired customer experience.
- Discovery: In this stage the agency will focus on user research, usage patterns, industry practices, trends and desired user experience.
- Analysis: Here the agency studies various personas, persona mapping, user journey, workflows, information architecture and eventually the user engagement.
- Interphase Designs: Now that all the research and user journey is planned the agency will work on the wire frames, UI controls, layout, colors, visual theme and the style guide.
- Interaction Models: Here the compatibility on various devices is tested, the usability is tested and after checking all the standards and compliances the final development ready design is delivered by the agency.
Conclusion
Crafting positive experiences is not just about creating beautiful looking screens, nor it’s about implementing great technology. It’s about the blend of technology, visual appeal, ease of use, learnability, functionality , It is about the system’s performance that adds up to the users’ experience and help them achieve their goals in the most efficient way.
Remember – “The first thing people buy on your website is not your product but your UI/UX” –Nandkumar Bhujbal