Outsourcing web UI work: what are the things that require attention?
Hi, I'm a back-end developer. I'm considering to outsource web UI design/implementation piece for my social project. What are the things that I should definitely pay attention to, when evaluating candidates for the web UI work? Thanks in advance for your advice.
Background:
- At current stage, it's a web survey that also involves landing page, email confirmation and referral. On next stage, The project needs a report/portal for outcome of survey.
- For concept illustration, I made a plain text UI by googled HTML/CSS/JS and integrated it with back-end. It's half-baked, for instance, incomplete UI validation. Coded by a back-end guy, this raw UI might not comply to any front-end best practice and is not mobile friendly. In fact, I even notice browser compatibility issue. A proper design and implementation by pro is definitely needed.
- The survey is a bit complicated in my opinion, involves 46-56 questions (after few rounds of trimming). In current "design", some questions expect composite answer, one even involves auto-completion and overlay subpage. I'm looking to simplify the survey, in terms of UI/UX design and question arrangement. Visual styling wise, I bet minimalist design is good for survey taker.
- In terms of navigation (to next question/page), I like the mechanism used in some SurveyMonkey templates, example: https://www.surveymonkey.com/mp/360-degree-employee-evaluation-survey-template/. However, questions in SurveyMonkey template is much simpler, I'm not sure if that mechanism fits the new design.
Hi Lee,
I've spent $100K's over my career on freelancers, some of that on UX/UI. While I'm completely on board with what you're facing, are you sure you need to re-invent the wheel?
There are so many no-code solutions out there that can connect to your API.
If you need something custom made, make sure you have decent UX/UI before writing a single line of code.
Cheers
Jonathan
Hi Jonathan, thanks for the suggestion. I thought about UI builder when starting this project, but I'm not sure if their capabilities are enough for the needs. I'll look into that option again. I'm evaluating Bubble.io, do you have any recommendations?
I believe UI builder is a great tool to save me from coding UI, but I'm not confident with my UX design skill, which I'm afraid UI builder won't help. From survey taker's perspective, I got a strong feeling that the survey's complexity will lead to high dropout rate. That's why I consider outsourcing, for getting UX pro's input.
I definitely don't want candidates to start implementation before design is agreed upon. Do you use any tool for candidates to communicate their design proposal without writing any code? I'm not sure if wireframing is too much work for candidates.
I'll be blunt, you don't need a UX expert to tell you that you'll have HIGH dropout rates the more questions you have, you've said so yourself :-)
One of the UX solutions we used in a previous solution I used was an aggregation of responses. We had a teletherapy solution where we needed onboarding of a LOT of questions to get a real assessment of the user. What we did is let them use the product, spicing up with a few questions between stages and then got the info we needed over a few sessions.
When it comes to hiring a UX/UI designer, most of them have great portfolios so you can see what makes you feel at home. If I'm hiring on Upwork or somewhere that handles payments - I'll usually pay for a test. I'll pay for an hour and ask them to do a task that I KNOW takes less than an hour but lets me assess the fit. It may seem expensive to pay for 5-10 hours of work for people you won't hire but it's MUCH cheaper than hiring the wrong person :-)
Cheers
Jonathan
I agree with you, it's not difficult to tell if the web front-end is complicated. I'm just ran out of idea on how to further simplify it, as current "design" already went through few iterations of improvement.
"What we did is let them use the product, spicing up with a few questions between stages and then got the info we needed over a few sessions."
I haven't think about beta, that might be what I need. I better start to make mock design and ask user feedback ASAP :)