Choosing The Right UX/UI Design Partner

Finding the right design partner can mean the difference between a company who acts, innovates (and thrives) and a company who stagnates and dies in this rapidly changing landscape.

Let’s look at some key things to consider when forging this partnership, so you don’t churn on subpar designs for 6 months, while your competitor releases something great in 3. 

In this article we’re going to hit some key points which will help you secure the right design partner, including:

• Why design matters to your business including the types of things the design process uncovers: i.e. killer features and demo moments and unmet market needs
• The key scenarios your business may be in (where design can make all the difference)
• Some “gotchas” in the design resourcing process including dark patterns by old school agencies
• Key things to look for in a design partner (including the hard skills and the culture aspects)
• How to prep for conversations with prospective design partners

Use this guide to make your search process more efficient and help you secure the right fit so you can get moving faster (in the right direction!). 🚀

Why design matters to your business

Whether your core offering is a SaaS or software enables your customers your main offering, design can be a key differentiator for your business. The fact is, that most business users don’t have the time or interest to learn a whole new mental model for your software and without the right design approach, your product has the potential to represent another frustrating barrier rather than an exciting cornerstone to their success. 

They don’t care how hard it is to develop new stuff in your current stack or the constraints of your org structure, they care about the value you create for them. Can you afford to disappoint them at various touch points throughout their experience? Even if they aren’t writing the cheques themselves, they are key partners in your success. 

Most companies (including your competitors) have ignored their users and haven’t truly harnessed the power of technology and design being in perfect alignment. They are missing out on opportunities, while you can detect new opportunities and even an entirely new market and market segments by leveraging the power of design. With our current climate around technology the impossible is becoming normal in shocking leaps forward. The time to capitalize on these enormous shifts is only possible with a great design point of view.

The design process can:

• uncover a killer feature that people will buy, 
• create a key demo moment that converts a conference attendee to a hot lead, 
• come up with an entirely new product idea, or;
•  find an unmet market need. 

It’s a process by which you can transform your business, if you’re one of the shrewd ones that can leverage it.

Scenarios where you might need a design agency

Scenario: You need to innovate with new technology like artificial intelligence, agentic AI, advanced sensors, VR/AR.

Internal teams aren’t often set up well to drive innovation, compared to an external team, who is unencumbered by organizational guardrails, history and quarterly goals. This cultural reality sets up an external crew better to deliver on new ideas, technology and innovation quickly.

Scenario: A lot to deliver on the roadmap and not enough designers.

You can call in an agency (if their work style is compatible) to supplement your team. Often the internal team is happy to have some assistance and the two teams can work as one to deliver new design work quickly.

We will often plug and play into your team and act as an ancillary UX crew, making sure the PMs and devs have what they need to make stuff. We love a good collaboration and contribute expertise on enterprise UX plus a healthy dose of humour and memes where needed. 

Scenario: You need to think through a future vision✨, but have no one internally to do this with

Whether you’re an exec or a PM, you often do a lot of thinking solo, which can be a bit lonely but also not always the most efficient. We work as a sounding board and future vision creator which can unlock alignment and excitement on the team through exciting prototypes and proofs of concept.

Scenario: we have absolutely no idea where to start with design and need a real UX person in the room

There may be a “lost” feeling on the product team, but an urgent business imperative to change the product line in a hurry - this might mean quick wins or big rethinks. Either way the right agency can help you.

If one or more of these scenarios is resonating, keep reading!

Why choosing the right UX/UI Agency matters

Design has never been more important in this competitive landscape, where development is streamlined and technical barriers disappear allowing companies to build faster and create more. Only, if you’re pushing out features that don’t matter to users or help sell your product, you can easily go off track, wasting opportunity every day that goes by. Designers (I mean, excellent designers) help you find innovation opportunities, direct your focus and untangle the complexity in ways the whole team can align around and move quickly. 

You’ll need an agency that has the right expert knowledge, people skills (and vibe) and leadership skillset to advance you through the process. Many agencies however rely on junior employees and other forms of “cheap labour” which may mean that the least expert people are tackling your hardest product problems. 

Dark patterns by old school design agencies

Large established agencies, especially with in-house marketing expertise are really good at selling and creating a mystique around their brand (fair enough!). The problem arises when you pay a hefty price tag for working with them and end up disappointed or just feeling that the ROI or cost/benefit are out of sync. Watch out for these scenarios and hidden tactics many agencies use to optimize their margins and deliver OK work:

• Creating intentional communication barriers between the client product team and the agency design crew (using an intermediary project manager) - this means questions and requests don’t flow naturally slowing down the process. Often leading to a bad user experience for the client including lots of “change requests” to increase scope.
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• Past greatness - companies who are relying on past buzz about their brand are not “hungry” to deliver greatness. Many larger agencies (but certainly not all!) rely on their size to “do the convincing” that their work is well done, even if it’s mediocre. 
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• Agencies who are “good at everything” - an agency can’t achieve excellence in all areas of the digital world at once, specialist focus is really important. This commitment to “doing everything” means that their team is comprised of generalists not the “best in the world” 
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• Dev agencies who slap on design into the contract - Though there are circumstances where design can come after scoping the technical part, but setting up a contract so that requirements are front end loaded means that your ability to discover a better approach is cut off at the knees, even if it could save you time and money

Design resourcing mistakes 

Even figuring out if you should go with an external team or start hiring internally can be a tough call. On one hand, an internal person can add continuity over time but they tend to take longer to find, longer to onboard and aren’t often well-positioned to innovate or influence culture. There’s also a difference in general expectations of a FTE and a consultant. An FTE is expected to attend many meetings, find alignment between parties and deliver sprint goals, an external party is expected to deliver excellent results very quickly all the time. 

This doesn’t mean that a hybrid approach to resourcing your design effort isn’t worth considering though, companies often need the external team to move quickly, misalign the team (throw the status quo out of whack) and shoot for the moon. Help shift the culture into the new era through inspiring design work and new ways of collaborating with team members. 

Hiring the wrong kind of designer 

There’s a huge difference between designer skillsets, and the training and experience trajectory is highly variable in our field. Nonetheless, using the wrong kind of design resource may leave your project in bad shape.

A common example is the difference between a web designer skillset versus a product designer one. Web designers may focus on reading experiences, SEO, content structure, beautiful graphics, brand, etc. Product designers look at the UX/UI in a specific lens focusing more on product structure, data, interactions, information architecture and dense UI’s with lots going on. These are very different skillsets and approaches. If you have a mismatch, the work won’t be as good as it could have been with a specialist.

Hiring the cheapo option 

We can’t count the amount of times that people come to us, burned from using a service like Fivver to get designs. On the less extreme disappointment scale, we have a bunch of designs that aren’t super realistic, and on the more extreme end, we have nothing usable and ghosted for thousands of dollars. The premise of “it’s cheap” is often not the best way to forge a great collaboration and partnership. 

Hiring the junior 

Now, there are a lot more basic scenarios a junior designer can thrive in, but you can’t expect to hire a solo intern-level person to be able to contribute to innovation and product and business architecture decisions quickly. They can be great at doing production work or improving stuff incrementally and they can come up with ideas. It’s the timeline and strategic wisdom aspect they can’t respond to (yet!).

The reality is, though, that most companies (especially right now), need expert design leadership and flawless delivery so they can make major shifts to their business and product line. 

Why it’s harder in complex domains to find great design resources

Whether you are hiring full time or external consultants, finding designers that bridge the technical and artistic divide are rare experts. Many designers who love to innovate don’t love the details surrounding things like system logic, data and subject matter expertise. Many designers who are into the technical side aren’t as good as the imaginative side. This balance and type of “designer persona” is a rare one. So don’t be surprised if you’re having a hard time finding it! (read our enterprise UX design guide to dive into the nuances about this type of design.)

Things to look for in an agency

Ok, now that we’ve explored the journey around deciding how to resource your project and you’ve started looking around, here’s what to look for and think about when you’re choosing a design agency. 

Culture fit 

Think about the working group on your side and the personalities in that group and how they might match up with the design crew you’re considering. If the group is very argumentative, your design team needs to have a strong skillset in leadership and verbal explanation of their design. If your team is very quiet but skeptical, you’ll want your designers to be very probing in their style and adapt their approach so that the team’s insights can be incorporated into the work. Now, once a meaningful design process starts, teams often see a shift in culture and mood (for the better), so this isn’t static. In general terms if the vibes of the leaders are compatible, chances are the collaboration will be successful.

Hard skills 

Make sure the team has the core skills you’ll be needing. If you need to think through the product architecture, flow, and understand users at a more fundamental level, a solid user experience (UX) focus is good. If you also have control over the look of the interface, you’ll want the designers to be “able to see” and craft beautiful interface designs. Most importantly, if you’re working in a domain that’s more complex, say fintech, logistics, biotech etc, you need to make sure that the team has the hard design skills and the enterprise software experience and workflow to make sure they can move fast and create designs that “get it”.

Work style 

This is one of those things that you may not think of right off the bat, but this underpins a great collaboration. Many agencies have a set format that slows down communication, so asking about this aspect of how they run is an important one. It’s also something great to ask their past clients.

Portfolio relevance (at a high level)

Avoid trying to find your exact problem mirrored in their portfolio, this is more about reading between the lines of their projects and identifying things that are important to you. If, say, the visual razzle dazzle is something you’re very worried about, make sure you ask for high fidelity examples. If you want to make sure that developer handover is smooth, ask them for UX documentation examples to support the slick looking case studies. If there are culture considerations, find out if certain structures or team dynamics were experienced in the past. If you have some really complex logic in your software, ask to see some flow diagrams. 

Preparing for conversations with UX/UI agencies 

There’s no set list of “to-do’s” before you engage with a UX/UI agency and explore collaboration possibilities, but these are some things to think about that might help you have clarity in the first few conversations. 

Formulate your main “why”

The core reasons why you need design help might be as simple as: “We’re releasing a science instrument next year and there’s no way to configure it in a UI”. This is a straightforward motivation that’s quite utilitarian. 

However, you may also need to articulate something more vague like: “We need to innovate, because new competitors are threatening our market share”. Or: “We need to speed up our sales process and improve our demo.” (see our demo whitepaper).

Often it’s somewhere in the middle: “We need to build a new product in the suite that is built on new technology to solidify our position in the marketplace.” (see our redesign checklist and blog post). 

Think about ROI 

Think about the urgency and importance of having a new design for your business. We see various levels of business cases coming through, some more urgent and important than others. Here are some examples, where do you fit in?

• “We need to update our product(s) to be more modern so that we can build easier.”
• “We need to innovate or a competitor will kill us in the next two years.” 
• “Our clients are churning because they aren’t seeing the product as essential or it’s too hard to use.”
• “Prospects aren’t seeing our product as “that impressive” during the demo.

We examine the ROI of UX, looking at aspects of time saved, resources saved, opportunity cost etc, have a look.

No matter your situation, you need to gain market share, keep the market share you have, or create a whole new market. Design is helpful regardless of your current position..

You don’t need to know the “how”

This is a note on what you don’t need to prepare. Now, it’s useful to have some idea of the scope of what you want to create, but most times, the design process acts as research into what is possible which will clarify what you actually want to build. Having a somewhat loose hold on to an idea of what you want can be helpful in the design process. So, feel free to write out some thoughts of what you want, but don’t put a lot of pressure on yourself to create a set specification you need to commit to. 

Wrapping up 

This article explored how you can assess and think about hiring the right UX/UI  agency from the lens of enterprise software especially. The task is not a light one, it’s important to avoid some general pitfalls of agency relationships and think about what you want in a design partner more specifically. The relationship is an important one, so use this as your guide to how to think about this “key hire”.

Pencil & Paper specializes in complex software, designing deceivingly simple interfaces for complex workflows, datasets and use cases. On the bleeding edge of technology, we help companies navigate their pivot to their next big thing with creativity, professionalism and speed. Get in touch to explore a design partnership with us.