UX Consulting: How To Know When You Need It

You may want to hire a UX consultant before you begin your next product development project. User experience consultants become particularly valuable when you have a team of junior designers or you want to create a product outside of your expertise.

By bringing a consultant in before you start the project, you can create an action plan that leads to success.

At this stage, UX design consultants can help:

• Establish milestones for your product’s development.
  
• Brainstorm features and interactions that users will love.
  
• Create a design system that keeps your designers focused on a unified goal.
  
• Explain the lean UX design process to improve your project’s efficiency.
  
• Anticipate problems that you might encounter while developing a product or taking your product to market.
  
• Estimate the cost of developing your product.
  

Instead of making mistakes at the beginning of your project, you can shorten your development time, lower development costs, and start making features that will attract loyal users.

Bring a UX Consultant on Board When You Start Designing

The beginning of a new project forces you to make a lot of decisions. Many project leaders feel overwhelmed by stress. In response, they experience creative doubts similar to “writer’s block.”

You cannot let the start of your design project falter. Mistakes that happen at the beginning will only create more work for your team later.

Bring a user experience consultant on board at the very beginning of your project so you can get off to a great start.

If you feel like your team needs a crash course in UX, you can hire a consultant to give everyone a UX workshop that will allow them to gain such skills like creating design systems that work. Apart from that they will also learn how to approach designs from the user’s perspective and define goals for the project.

Other benefits of hiring a user experience consultant at the beginning of the design project include:

• Creating wireframes and early prototypes.
• Developing icons, color schemes, interactions, and other assets.
• Choosing an approach to project management that elements waste and improves efficiency.
• Providing feedback that can streamline the rest of the development process.

Your designs need to make an impression on users within 10 seconds. After that, people are more likely to abandon your product. Using a UX consultant at the beginning of your design process helps ensure that you grab your audience’s attention immediately.

Hire a User Experience Consultant When Your Team Gets Stuck

What happens when your team encounters an unexpected problem during product development? Sometimes, a challenge can encourage your designers to find creative solutions. 

Often, though, people get frustrated by the sudden pause in productivity. They felt good about their work, but now they struggle to differentiate between great designs and terrible designs.

Hiring a UX consultant when your team gets stuck offers a fresh perspective on the problem. 

Your design team might feel lost because it naturally wants to keep moving forward with the project as planned. An outsider can look at the situation without the emotional baggage that comes from expectations and hours of hard work.

A consultant also has the benefit of working with diverse clients. Working with many clients means that UX consultants learn from companies that design a variety of products for different audiences. The consultant may already know a solution that will put your team back on the right path to success.

Get a UX Design Consultant About Halfway Through Your Project

Once you reach a project’s midway point, you have an opportunity to look back and reassess your work. If you discover unappealing or dysfunctional aspects of your work now, then you can correct those mistakes before moving forward.

Do you and your team have a clear vision that lets you review your work objectively?

This is a great moment to have a UX design consultant go over your progress. Hopefully, the consultant will find very few problems with your work. Then, you can sprint through the final steps of developing your product. If the consultant notices some issues, you still have time to fix them without ruining your design schedule.

No one likes redoing work, but it’s better to correct mistakes halfway through a project instead of waiting until the end when you have much more to fix.

Hire a Consultant Before Taking Your Product to Market

The moment you take your product to market, you will start hearing about all of the good and bad features that you included. User feedback plays an important role in improving your product, attracting more customers, and generating more revenue.

You don’t have to wait until you release the product before you make those improvements, though. Instead, you can hire a UX consultant with experience reviewing products, noticing irregularities, and troubleshooting features that don’t work perfectly. Use the information to improve your product before giving users access.

You want to release a product with as few bugs as possible so you can get better reviews from experts and users. You will probably decide to make some changes as you gather data about how people use your product. Still, it helps to start with as few problems as possible.

UXPin Makes It Easy to Work With UX Design Consultants

UXPin’s features make it easy for your team to work with user experience consultants at every step of a project.

Many teams choose UXPin as their design and prototyping tool because it allows them to build prototypes that work just like finished products. The prototyping features lets consultants experience the design as the real thing. Consultants can even use real data when they test your design interactions.

UXPin also makes it easy to share your prototypes with consultants. Your consultant doesn’t need a UXPin account to review your prototype. Instead, you can send a link that lets the UX expert access your work. The link lets anyone experience the prototype. They don’t even need a password.

Start your free trial with UXPin so you can experience the benefits of using a tool that combines the features of designing and prototyping software. Once you see how UXPin helps your team collaborate with consultants, you’ll want to sign up for full membership.