Remember Google’s Santa Tracker that was created to commemorate Christmas last year? It was unmissable, of course. They sure do have genius designers at Google.
Well, yes, but also – no. Because the fabulous Santa Tracker that captivated the young and old alike was created by an outsourced design team.
Quite like Slack teamed up with Metalabs to design their digital products, savvy product leaders know that allocating resources efficiently is key to achieving maximum results.
Designing and maintaining an enterprise product is resource-intensive. As a product leader, minimizing resource consumption and decreasing product design and development costs is a top priority.
Companies like Google and Slack realize the importance of working smarter, not harder, and focus their energies on finding the perfect partner to deliver delightful products to their customers.
In this blog, we delve into augmenting your product team with external UX design experts who can help save you resources and time. But before we get to that, let’s take a look at what outsourcing truly entails and why more and more companies – both, established and startups – are opting in favor of it.
The Business Benefits of Outsourcing
Investment in the IT sector remains relatively strong – despite being in the midst of an economic recession. Forrester Research predicts the sector to grow at a healthy 10.5% in 2023.
What are the reasons behind this stability?
For starters, business leaders who have smartly managed to downscale their operations and outsource their requirements have helped their companies to not just survive, but thrive through past recessions.
Partnering with an expert user experience design agency or a development agency has been recognized as a cost-saving measure for product companies across sectors and sizes.
When it specifically comes to UX design, outsourcing presents a multitude of benefits for product companies (beyond economic reasons), such as –
- Domain knowledge: Experienced UX design teams possess the expertise and experience of working with multiple industries and solving wicked enterprise problems.
- Specialized services: Professional user experience design firms offer specialized research and usability testing services that in-house teams may not be equipped to handle.
- Cost-effectiveness: It is cost-effective to solicit high-quality design services without the overhead costs associated with hiring and maintaining an in-house team.
- Scalability: External UX teams scale and adapt their services to meet the needs of the clients, be it in terms of additional support during peak periods or for specific projects.
3 Cost-saving Advantages of a Plug-and-Play UX Design Team
Save on the hassles of hiring
It’s no secret that the cost of outsourcing external UX design resources is much more affordable than hiring employees and configuring an in-house design team.
Team augmentation, when done on a project basis ensures that you bear no burden of salary costs for retaining and maintaining a full-fledged team when the project is paused or over.
Secondly, as a product leader, you stand to gain from this cost-cutting measure, thanks to the disparity in the wage patterns of quality UX designers in different countries. Therefore, there are plentiful opportunities to accomplish any given sprint or project at meager costs. According to LinkedIn data, the number of job postings for contract roles in the technology industry tripled in the last two years.
This scenario has been proven to be even more evident in the case of offshore outsourcing. For instance, companies in North America can save around 30% to 90% of development costs if they outsource business functions to countries such as Vietnam, The Philippines, or India.
Besides, nothing compares to the freedom that comes from the flexibility to upsize or downsize your team as per your requirements. It means you can have fewer employees on your team when the workload is not too heavy and augment your outsourcing team should the situation demand during peak times.
Flexibility and scalability keep you proactive in responding to the constant fluctuations of businesses and projects without straining your budget.
Operational costs aren’t yours to bear
Operational expenses of maintaining in-house teams are much higher when compared to external teams. Sustaining in-house employees entails additional expenses to the company’s budget, in the form of official supplies, hardware, software licenses, IT system maintenance, etc. While this may not seem like a significant expense to bigger, more established companies, it can have a severe impact on the budget and operations of smaller startups in the long run.
Outsourcing a UX design team helps smaller, inexperienced businesses to sustain at low operational costs since the UX design agency is in charge of managing their teams, and they are expected to have the necessary facilities and equipment in place.
Just as you bypass the need to hire UX designers, you also save costs on training programs, since they are not on your company’s payroll. Outsourcing not just saves hiring costs, but also ensures you do not spend time and resources on training.
If that’s not a win-win, we don’t know what is!
Pursue opportunities instead of expenses
Outsourcing a UX design team isn’t merely a cost-saving measure, it’s also valued in terms of the opportunities it can help to create.
Master your strengths, outsource your weaknesses.
— Ryan Kahn, Founder of The Hired Group
Admittedly, outsourcing your UX design needs is a quick and clever way to transfer the non-core business processes to a third party that is better equipped to handle them than you do. This takes a huge load off your internal force and channels your resources, capital, and personnel to prioritize the core functions of your business.
Outsourcing not only cuts costs but also enables product teams to make better use of time. And, in most business cases, saving time is equivalent to saving money. As outsourcing can shorten the turn-around time for UX research, ideation, prototyping, and user testing, it accelerates your development processes. This way, products, and features are validated and rolled out faster, which helps in seizing market opportunity.
Koru’s Team Augmentation Model
Generally, outsourcing a UX design partner happens over the course of the following steps:
- Estimating the work to be done and the time frame for completion
- Establishing a UX design budget
- Researching the quality of service and pricing plans
- Recruiting a team that aligns with your design vision and fits your budget
Over the past decade as a specialist enterprise user experience design agency, we have created a collaboration system that lets our UX designers be a part of our client’s in-house product teams.
Our UX design team engagement model provides a host of custom combinations to suit your needs, be it UX research, ideation, prototyping, user testing, concept validation, or UX audits. We ensure that our resources blend seamlessly with the client’s team and stay with you as long as required and function in unison.
A specialist UX design team guides businesses to save resources through their intimate understanding of how people interact with technology. Their insights can help reduce the need for costly and time-consuming research on UX design, and their knowledge of effective design can save organizations money by avoiding redesigns and rework. In addition, their skills in stakeholder management and change management can help organizations avoid the pitfalls of failed UX projects.
Got more questions about choosing the right UX design agency or outsourcing your UX design needs? We’re here to help!
