The modern business world has many new concepts to deal with, including digital marketing, social media, and user experience. Moreover, user experience design – or simply UX design – has become one of the central structures for businesses trying to embrace both offline and online audiences. It means that building your UX team will require much more mindful consideration compared with a few years back, mainly because it’s getting harder and harder to secure top talent.
We are going to take a look at some of the ways UX design agencies can get a hold of reliable professionals and build strong teams. In particular, we’ll explore the mindsets and cultures that help create amazing teams, among other things. Ready? Buckle up and let’s go for a ride.
People Over Titles
Before thinking about what kinds of designers you require, try first to think about your company’s particular goals and how to achieve them. Make sure you understand what types of services and products you are creating. For instance, when developing digital products, you would require a UX design team consisting of a UX lead, UX and UI designers, UX researchers, and front-end developers in the basic configuration.
The important thing here, however, is that every company you work with – your clients – has a different way of handling matters, different language, approach to solving problems, business vision, goals, etc. This is where different traits and skills come in and help put the puzzle together. Therefore, employers start looking solely for titled specialists.
However, it might be reasonable to move away from titles. It’s much more practical to focus on an employee as a person. Alternatively, think of the mix of personalities and skills needed for your team that would add efficiency and coherence to it. This way, you will develop a better understanding of where you have additional problems and how you can solve them.
For instance, working on pretty much every project, you will most likely have to take care of either all or most of the following tasks:
- Conducting user interviews;
- Running user testing;
- Creating catchy user surveys;
- Creating prototypes, storyboards, user personas, etc.;
- Creating style guides, design concepts, and so on.
By setting titles aside and focusing on your team’s primary skills required for your business’ success, you will be able to build a reliable UX design team.
Roles and Competencies
After establishing the right team and design culture, you can move on to dealing with your team’s first skill sets. Remember that you need to form a team that will be well-balanced, highly functional, and productive.
First of all, it’s best to get rid of the “unicorn designers” notion. If you’re not a small startup company, you should understand that you should never ask or expect a single person to take care of every design task.
Although a good designer should be able to balance a wide range of design aspects, it’s nearly impossible to do all of them well. The best UI/UX Design Companies will have two well-developed and established skills and be somewhat proficient in perhaps two more.
After clarifying this, you may start by determining the main competences for your team, such as:
- Prototyping;
- User interface design;
- User testing.
When you’ve done that, think about the things you’d like to have, but that are not fundamental, such as:
- Animation;
- Content strategy and planning;
- Data analysis.
Don’t forget about team role flexibility. By being flexible as an executive, you provide employees with the freedom to get involved in various design needs and functions. This flexibility can also manifest by letting people move on to new projects, which will help avoid project fatigue and, thus, boost productivity. However, this can generate another issue: people can start moving around projects too often, losing focus and, hence, reducing productivity, so you have to be aware of these shortcomings and balance between the two extremes.
Each team eventually evolves, as the process, technology, and company needs will provide various boosts to your staff. At the same time, some of the employees will develop their skills better than their workmates. As their boss, you have to take notice of such changes and understand them. You will need to guide them through their journey, encouraging them to push onward towards their full potential.
Don’t force any single specialist you hire to stay on the same track. On the contrary, challenge them with new tasks, tools, projects, and outcomes. It will help you get more creative and effective results from your team and, at the same time, gain their respect and loyalty.
The Bottom Line
UX design marches on and is becoming more and more essential to the values and vision at the heart of the corporate strategy. What this means is that the demand in quality design will only increase in the coming years, and by assembling the right team the right way, your company can excel in this niche. At the same time, the competition is getting more and more intense, as larger companies with huge budgets also try to hold on to their designers, while upgrading them.
Nevertheless, the correct approach will allow you to both single out outstanding designers in the crowd and create an environment, culture, and design process that draws the finest specialists as well as clients towards your design agency.