How do I 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.

• Jeff Bezos invested 100X more into customer experience than advertising during the first year of Amazon.
• 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.

1. Development Cost &
2. 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.

1. Strategy: Here the agency will understand your business objectives, product vision, road map, priorities/timelines and finally the desired customer experience.
2. Discovery: In this stage the agency will focus on user research, usage patterns, industry practices, trends and desired user experience.
3. Analysis: Here the agency studies various personas, persona mapping, user journey, workflows, information architecture and eventually the user engagement.
4. 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.
5. 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.

Look for the following while choosing and agency

• Experience in the Sector: Take a look at the portfolio of the agency and understand the sectors they have worked in, this is a good indicator that they must have studied your competition thoroughly in terms of user experience and that they are well aware of what ticks in this user universe. The agency experience is also important as they would guide you at every step of your product journey and give you a birds eye point of view, the ability to give out of the box solutions is what you should look at.
• Time to Deliver: Discuss in detail the timeline the agency is will to commit to, chances are that the agency will be willing to deliver in a short amount of time is they know what they are going to work on and also a good indicator of the domain expertise the agency has.
• Cadence Calls: It is crucial that the agency keeps you appraised at every stage of the work done in minute detail so ask the agency about the frequency of its cadence calls, a good agency will be willing to do 3 to 5 calls a week.
• Hourly Charges: Agencies charge anywhere between $10 to $150 per hour this depends a lot on the type of work you get done from them. But most agencies would be pocket friendly.
• Agency Resources: One needs to know the number of resources the agency will dedicate for your project, a mix of creative and experienced resources and help you with a quicker TAT and will guide you in avoiding pitfalls on the whole.