One of the side effects of running UXMTL, a growing local community forum for Montrealers interested in UX design, is that I’d often get asked: “Know a good information architect?” “Who’s the top UI person in town?” “Do you know an amazing UX person I can hire?”
I find myself employing a favourite answer of UXers: “it depends” — because it does. UX spans over a wide range of skillsets and knowledge areas; like any other field, we have specialists and generalists. The best person for one job may not turn out to be the right person for another.
If you’re looking to hire someone to help you out, there are a few questions you can clarify before you seek out a UX designer to work with:
- What kind of work do you need done?
- Are you looking for someone to visualize an existing concept?
- Are you looking for someone to help you make sense of raw ideas and create a strategy for what works?
- What kind of site, or application are you building?
- Is it predominantly for mobile, desktop, or are you planning for a ubiquitous presence?
- Is your product content/editorial-heavy, flow-driven or is it a new, radical concept?
- Are you predominantly looking for feedback?
- What is the size of your budget — if you’d like to hire the top folks in town, do you have the cash for it?
Depending on your answers to these questions (and there are of course, more), you could end up with a few candidates with different strengths and skillsets. There’s also a fairly good chance that you need more than one UX person on your team.
There are already some good resources out there for how to put a UX team together, and this will also help you figure out what kinds of questions you need to be asking:
- Building the UX Dreamteam (Part 1)
- Building the UX Dreamteam (Part 2)
- How to Manage a UX team — slides 7-9, 13-20 are particularly useful in this context
Good luck and happy hiring!