7 Best Tips For Evaluating UX/UI Designers

In today’s technology-driven world, when most of the media around us is digital, UI/UX has become more significant than ever. Whether it be a mobile app or a website, having an aesthetically pleasing and practical interface is what tempts users to stay. And so, UI/UX designers who can bring something new and creative to the table are highly sought after. Companies are in a race to hire the best designers to help them stand out from the crowd and lure in users with their ingenious designs.

But, in a world where every other designer claims to be eminent and experienced, it is difficult to find the one who will understand your demands and work as desired. If you are a recruiter who is facing a similar predicament, this article is for you. Read on to find out how you can smoothen the process of hiring the right UX/UI designer for your firm.

Where to Find UI/UX Designers?

The first step before hiring UI/UX designers is to know where to look for them. You can post recruitment ads on different employment websites or social networking sites such as LinkedIn, Toptal, Just UX Jobs, etc. Or, you can get in touch with designers through contacts and references. One major advantage of this method is that you will come across only legit designers. No bogus applicants.

Visiting online communities where countless designers display their creativity periodically is also a great option. Websites such as Dribbble are a great platform for UX/UI designers from all around the world to post their designs on the web. Rummaging through these websites can help you come across designers that might suit your needs.

7 Tips for Evaluating UI/UX Designers

Once you have found some designers who fit your company’s selection criteria, it’s time to decide who will leave and who will stay. Evaluating designers is a complicated and time-consuming task. You need to keep in mind that you are not hiring a designer who is the best out of the available options. You are hiring one who is the best fit for your company. Hence, to begin the hiring process, you first need to do some homework. Here we have 7 tips that can help you decide better while hiring a UX/UI designer.

1. Recognize Your Needs

Before you start evaluating designers, you need to form a basis for your judgment. Simply sifting designers left and right only to realize you have none left in your repository is not the right approach. Also, when specifying the criteria for the hiring process, make sure to not copy some other firm’s benchmarks. This also means that you should not pick generic guidelines from the internet and base your hiring process on them. Doing so will probably end up with you hiring a UX designer who is good at his job but doesn’t fit your firm’s criteria.

To make sure you are hiring the right guy, you need to list your requisites and assess designers based on them. Sit with your team for a brainstorming session and chalk out the requirements your firm is looking for in a UI/UX designer. This will help you appraise designers more optimally and drastically reduce the hiring time.

2. Create a Sheet Containing the Necessary Hard and Soft Skills

The next step in the hiring process is to lay down the necessary skills you want in a designer.

These skills are divided into:

Hard Skills: These refer to the technical skills required to do a project. These include wireframing, prototyping, visual communication prowess, and user research.

Soft Skills: Apart from technical proficiency, a designer needs to have the necessary design aptitude. The designer needs to be creative, curious, and emphatic. They should also be able to communicate adeptly with the rest of the team.

Having an idea of what skills to look for in a UI/UX designer will help ease up the hiring process by a huge margin. Creating a skill sheet will help you filter the candidates more efficiently allowing you to retain the ones that fit the bill.

3. Assessing the Hard Skills

Gauging the hard skills in a UI/UX designer is a crucial part of the evaluation process. You must carefully assess whether the designer can:

• use the necessary designing tools
• present his ideas accurately before the team
• conduct good user research to figure out the target audience.

One way to go about this is by checking a designer’s past work or giving test tasks to him/her. Doing so will help you judge the relevancy of the designer for your company.  

4. Assessing the Soft Skills

Hard skills form the necessary foundation for UI/UX designing but, soft skills make a designer worth hiring. Whether a designer can collaborate with the rest of the team members, empathize with the end-users, create ingenious designs and involve themselves deeply in a given project will tell you whether they are a good fit for your firm.

5. Assessing the Personal Skills

This next set of skills has less to do with designing but is nonetheless fundamental to the hiring process. Adaptability, good problem-solving skills, teamwork, meticulousness, attitude towards fellow teammates, loyalty, flexibility, etc., are some of the desirable qualities that you should check a candidate for.

6. Creating an Effective Interview Process

Now that you know what to look for in a candidate while hiring, it is necessary to structure the interview accordingly. You need to prepare beforehand to make sure you ask only the right set of questions and create an environment in which you as well as the candidate feel at ease. Apart from this, in the case of remote interviews, you also need to prepare for any technical issues that might pop up and ruin the interview. Also, provide accurate instructions to the candidates to make the process as seamless as possible.

7. Avoiding Certain Hiring Mistakes

Last but not the least, there are some hiring flaws that you need to look out for while recruiting designers.

• Don’t Prioritize Only Skills: While skills are necessary, prioritizing them over other aspects of the interview is never a good idea. So avoid going after only certain skills and adopt a holistic approach for the hiring process.
• Don’t Follow the Same Old Interview Technique: Never hesitate to revamp the hiring process if you believe that doing so will increase its efficiency.
• The Resume is not Everything: It is easy to overestimate a candidate’s resume and form an opinion of them before the interview. Never judge a candidate until you have assessed and verified every detail in the resume for yourself.

Conclusion

UI/UX designers are a company’s most crucial assets. They not only help in providing a great user experience to the consumers but also improve the company’s brand value with their ingenious designs. But hiring the aptest candidate for your firm can be an arduous task. And diving headfirst sans any preparations will only increase the complexity of the evaluation process. Hence, following a systemic approach and abiding by the above-mentioned tips can help you assess UI/UX designers much more efficiently and recruit the one that best suits your company’s needs!