When product companies become obscene for designers, it is necessary to decide who to assign it to. In product companies, the designer is no longer the end user, working on a mobile application, web service or any other digital product. A designer is a multidisciplinary position with responsibilities that go beyond operations. He can influence strategic decisions on product development, customer satisfaction and loyalty. In this situation, it is necessary to understand all the pros and cons of hiring designers on the staff or outsourcing. Let’s get to the bottom of this. At the end of article takeaway recommendations on the hiring of in house, vs outsource designers.
Speaking of design outsourcing, we mean that the production company works with a web design agency or a digital agency. Work with freelancers is not considered in this article.
1. In House vs Outsource – Money
Why pay an hourly rate to someone on outsourcing when the designers in the office are cheaper, more manageable and work full time? At first glance, that’s what it looks like. The cost of good specialists on outsourcing, in various design studios and development companies, varies from $15 to $30 per hour.
Do you think this is much more expensive than the cost of a designer in the office? Add to that the tax deductions, training and development, downtime, vacations, sick leave, subscriptions to digital services, equipped workplaces, a hardware upgrade.
2. Availability and Scalability
Product development is the continuous work of the whole team. How does it work in practice? First, they make a design, then give it to the programmers. This results in designers, if they are on staff, being busy at first and then, at the programming stage, sitting idle, occasionally doing design quality control. Companies with designers on staff find it difficult to cope with this uneven workload. They then have too many tasks for designers, then too many designers and a few tasks.
With outsourcing, there are no such problems. The company involved manages the load itself. This level of scalability is offered by managed cloud hosting services, since the cloud is an ever-growing, virtual space. These services can include data management and restructuring, to enhance your optimization as your business grows. By using their services, as well as those of a specialist wed designer, they can work together to create adaptable solutions for your business, seamlessly incorporating both the front-facing design and back-end software.
3. In House vs Outsource – Expertise and Experience
When you hire an in house designer, he comes to you with his luggage of knowledge, education and skills. If the company does not give him the opportunity to continuously learn, to improve the work process, to be aware of trends and innovations, then in the long term this person will not be able to keep your product at the highest level.
If you cannot afford to train and employ more than one designer, it is better to employ remote specialists. UX designers and strategists, UI-designers, art directors adopt each other’s experience and bring fresh knowledge and experience from other projects and areas to your product.
4. Creative Thinking
Admission of the first designer to the staff can be accompanied by the following dialogues.
Director: “Here’s your job. Now make us a great product without changing what we have already created”.
The Вeveloper: “Hi, I’m waiting for new layouts from you.”
Marketer: “During the development process, we do not communicate with clients, we know what to do. We don’t have to show them anything”.
They say that the company does not have the principles of creative design thinking, and thus the orientation to users and their interests are also ignored.
Not every designer, who has just got into a new team, will dare to offer and change the established working process of product development.
In such situations, it is easier to work with outsourcing. Then there will be an “external” excuse to change some work processes and installations. It will have more weight than if it sounds from an in-house designer who has decided to revolutionize the office.
In House Vs Outsource – Is Outsourcing Always Better?
You can’t say that you always lose out when you hire in-house designers, but design, especially when it comes to UX (user experience) research and design, requires constant training and development. The design has become a profession that is too big to fit within one company. That’s why large companies are more willing to build long-term partnerships with website designing agencies that specialize in UX design or buy out design teams completely instead of creating from scratch and nurturing themselves.