According to a study, an average person visits almost 138 websites daily. That number has nearly doubled in the last ten years, where an average person visited almost 72 websites per day. Hence, it is evident that users today love to surf the internet.
Whatever the scenario, if you want to attract and hold the online users on your site, then having an excellent user interface and user experience is a must. And how can you achieve that? Simple!
By hiring perfect and professional UI/UX designers. But, what are the user interface and user experience? Let’s have a look!
What is UI/UX all about?
The best web applications have a design that attracts attention, is easy to navigate, and is easy to use. What the user sees and interacts with is called the User Interface (UI). How easy it is to use, and the general experience is called User Experience (UX).
According to a study by Forrester Research, a better user interface can improve your website’s conversation rate by 200%. At the same time, a better UX can improve this conversion rate by more than 400%. Likewise, a study by Amazon Web Services showed.
88% of online consumers are less likely to return to a site after a bad experience. - Justin Mifsud, founder, Usability Geek
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Role of a UI/UX designer
UI designers are supposed to understand the interaction between users and products. These interactions can be understood through market research or by installing tools on their websites and apps to help them determine the regions of each web page that customers frequently use.
UX designers need to have a slightly more profound understanding of users. First, they need to understand why users come to a particular website. This can be done by creating hypothetical personas or dummy users. Once this understanding has been gained, UX designers should design user flows that make it easy for their ideal customer to purchase the product that needs to be sold. UI and UX designers generally work in close engagement and can often be the same person.
Top sites to hire a UI/UX designer
Hiring UI/UX designers is not an easy task. Therefore, we have collected some of the best websites, services, and recruitment marketplaces ready to help you find and hire top UI/UX designers.
LinkedIn
LinkedIn is one of the largest professional networking sites. It’s a great place to find qualified front-end developers with different backgrounds and skill sets worldwide. In addition, LinkedIn has several valuable features such as search filters, recommendations, and direct messaging.
Twitter
Twitter is a great social media platform where you can discover and connect with experienced front-end engineers. In addition, you can use direct messaging and narrow your search based on your needs.
Meetup
Meetup is a good platform for finding and building communities based on similar interests. A meetup profile will show you what other meetups or groups the person is part of, their interests, and social links. You can reach out on a different platform or send a personalised email directly through Meetup.
Github
GitHub is the largest development platform where developers can work collaboratively on software projects. This makes it the perfect place to find some pretty incredible talent. Profiles on GitHub contain plenty of information that can give you a good idea about the skills and experience of the front-end developer.
Upwork
Upwork is a good option for companies or startups looking to fill an immediate contractor role. However, if you are looking for a freelancer and have the time to select candidates, you can consider hiring freelance UI/UX designers on Upwork.
AngelList
AngelList job is a resource for companies of all sizes. It also has a job board to help you connect with UI/UX interested in working with a startup.
Technical Skills to look for in a UI/UX designer
Now that you have a good understanding of the responsibilities of UI/UX designers and where to source them from, you must assess the individual’s skill set to ensure it matches your requirements.
Here are some of the technical skills to look out for:
Writes and structures clean code
You should identify whether your developer can make sound technical decisions and write and structure clean code. Software development is so much more than “does it work.” Will it work in the future, will it keep working after another feature is added, will it work when we have 10,000 users, will it work on all these different devices, will it work with a team, will other developers understand it? These are the questions to ask when evaluating the quality of the code.
Good debugging skills
A good front-end developer’s most distinguishing feature is the ability to deep-dive, investigate, find, and fix issues. This is usually half the job in larger-scale applications. The developer should be able to leverage tools, experience, and problem-solving skills to investigate and fix problems with your application quickly.
You can quickly test these skills in an interview by giving the developer a problem to solve in a project they’ve never seen before and talking you through their thinking process.
Keeps themselves up to date
A good front-end developer knows JavaScript in and out and can work well with modern front-end frameworks such as React, Vue, and Angular. In addition, they should be keen and willing to try new things and are excited to share new things they learned with your team.
Familiar with a Test Driven Development (TDD) approach
Test-driven development means writing tests before the functionality is written. Developers who take this approach usually produce code that has fewer bugs and is less likely to be broken by other developers due to the automated tests “protecting it” from being broken. This is especially useful to look out for in larger projects.
Soft skills to look for in a UI/UX designer
When looking to hire a remote UI/UX designer, apart from technical skills, there are also certain qualities you need to look for. Here are five such attributes-
Empathy: The designer needs to understand the users’ motives for visiting the website or app.
Strategic Thinking: The designer must have a mind for business and be able to think about revenue maximization through design.
Facilitation: UX designers must be able to teach others their crafts and aim for a broader knowledge base.
Research: The UX designer must be capable of user research and result interpretation.
Agility: The designer should be able to implement agile methodologies and improve process efficiency.
How to Write a UI/UX Job Description?
Once you have a pretty good idea of what and where to look for front-end developers, the only thing left is to write a compelling job description.
Creating a captivating job description is an essential part of the recruitment process to attract suitable candidates. It not only sets the initial expectations for the role but is also the first opportunity to introduce your company to a potential hire. And this stands for any industry and job title. To complete your front-end developer job description, you can also include information about the salary and additional perks and benefits.
Salary of a UI/UX designer
While an initial job search on Indeed for “UX/UI Designer” has over 3,000 results, it’s difficult to find average salaries for this role. This may simply be because the job title combines what is technically (and commonly) two separate roles.
Do a little digging, though, and you’ll find that Glassdoor places the average base salary in the U.S. at $85,277 per year (with a full range from $59,000-128,000)—higher than the average salary for either “UX Designer” or “UI Designer” roles (the later averaging $64,366 per year).
Quick tips to keep in mind while hiring the best UI/UX designer
Let us quickly discuss the top eight proven tips for hiring the best UI/UX designer for your project!
1. Analyse their Portfolio
If you want to have a thorough idea about the workings of the UI/UX designer, then it is better to analyze their portfolio.
Verifying the UI/UX designer’s past work and carefully analyzing their past customers’ reviews could help you properly evaluate the designer’s work. Moreover, it would also give you an idea of the work strategy of the designer and whether it suits your organization or not.
2. Curiosity Plays a Great Role
Curiosity plays a vital role in defining the overall commitment of the designer. If a candidate has limited skills but is ready to learn and adapt to new things, then that UI/UX designer should be your first choice. That’s because they are prepared to explore and learn new things to enhance your project.
Now, to know whether a person is curious to learn new things or not, you can ask them several questions like:
- What was the recent thing they learned in designing?
- What platform do they like the most for learning and exploring new things?
- Are they looking forward to learning new skills to enhance the project’s design?
3. Strong User Research
Research plays a vital role in defining the skill and experience of your chosen UI/UX designer. While some designers may craft a beautiful design for the project, meeting the end goals can only be achieved with proper research and satisfying the user’s needs.
That’s why you should hire only those UI/UX designers with strong research capabilities. They need to be in sync with the latest design approach and should also generate an aesthetic design for the project.
4. Hiring Plans are also Important
While hiring the best UI/UX designer, one thing that is often underlooked is the budget. Of course, you need to have a specific budget for your project, and that budget will decide the type of designer you need. However, suppose your project is medium or enormous and directly portrays your brand value in front of your audience. In that case, hiring UI/UX designers from a reputed and cost-effective software engineering firm is advisable. Why? That’s because a software engineering firm will offer certified and professional designers with years of experience delivering aesthetic design for various projects.
Never hire the wrong UI/UX designer again – Try WeCP
WeCP is a tech recruitment platform for conducting technical screenings and remote interviews. Our platform reduces the stress, cost, and time on the in-house technical team to recruit a viable candidate through:
Customized Skill Assessments
With a repository of over a million questions for assessing over 2000 tech skills, with specific questions for UI/UX designing, WeCP helps recruiters analyze the problem-solving capabilities and expertise of the candidates
Deep Analysis of Candidate performance
For a successful analysis of the candidate’s performance, an efficient technical screening tool is required to filter the qualified candidates. WeCP has 1000+ programming assessment tests and 12+ metrics to hire tech talent with a pre-built and customizable library of tests. This makes the job of the recruiters and hiring managers easier and smoother by ten times.
Our platform also analyzes candidates’ performance and provides detailed reports that are easy to understand for non-technical recruiters.
Our UI/UX test template is intricately designed and includes questions that cater to your company’s demands and guarantee to help you find the best talent.
Final Overview
You’ve come to the end of our complete guide to hiring the best front-end developers.
We’ve run through the major components (pun intended) to help you choose the best UI/UX designer for your team.
Ready to hire your next UI/UX Designer?
Whether you need a technical partner to help you interview candidates or a fully functioning team ready to get to a running start on day one — WeCP will always remain ecstatic to assist you on your journey!
Contact us for more information.
Or schedule a free demo with us.
