How to hire a visual/interaction designer
Design by committee is a bad idea.
Everyone knows this but few people practice it. There’s an inherent desire to get everyone’s input on the project, especially in a small team. What this leads to is a lot of argument and very little progress.
Especially bad is the idea that team members should give feedback directly to the designer. While everyone is entitled to an opinion, when the entire team is saying conflicting things, the result is a desire to either run away or to produce a design which satisfies everyone’s criticism which usually means a design that is not pleasing to any single person, perhaps most importantly of all the target user.
Any feedback to the designer should be filtered through your design liaison who will speak directly to your designer.
Get educated.
Get someone on the team who is educated on design to be the liaison to the designer. If no one is educated enough, get someone up to speed with the basics. Great resources include Cooper’s interaction design bible: About Face (linked on the left) and the website Boxes & Arrows as well as 37 signals blog Signal v. Noise. Reading the book will get you 90% of the way to being a great liaison leader for a design project.
Speaking the same language increases information flow exponentially. Can you say things like Fitt’s law and Blank Slate View to your designer? Without knowing the basics of interaction design, a team is at the mercy of the designer’s whim. By understanding the basics, there is a common language to speak and fall back on when there is a disagreement between you and the designer. It’s certainly much more effective to explain why something doesn’t work when you can say more than “it just doesn’t feel right”.
Design equals communication.
Adjust the hiring process. Besides the obvious of looking at previous work and references, the big question you want to answer is whether the designer understands your goals and is easy to communicate with. This is not something you’ll glean in a short interview. The way we went about the process was to ask our prospects to complete a short initial design task (usually this involved doing a simple interaction and art direction mockup of one of our pages).
Most designers will be reluctant to do this for free, and it’s ok to pay them for the initial work. Consider it equivalent to a fee you might pay a headhunter. One technique we found particularly effective was to offer a small upfront fee (typically 10% of their total bid) with a promise of a larger bonus if the project went to the designer. In this way, our initial financial commitment was small, and if we found someone who we liked, we had absolutely no problem in paying them an extra bonus — great people are worth their weight in gold.
Pay attention to your designer’s behavior during the initial mockup trial period. Does she go away for three days or a week and deliver something without ever talking to you? Red flag! Design is not about making a pretty picture, it’s about communicating with the client and understanding their needs. Don’t expect the designer to change once hired. If they’re not willing to give you their best during the mockup period, they obviously have more important things to attend to other than your project, so move on.
Our Story
Our first attempts at hiring a designer to revamp Planypus were glorious failures. We saw work that seemed competent, but we failed to realize that above hiring someone with design talent, we needed to hire a good communicator.
The web is the core of our business; communicating our vision to our designer was vitally important. It took us four tries to find someone who got it: Luciano Pouzada. He listened. He asked questions. He critically analyzed the information we put in front of him. And he turned our vision into reality. He was always online, communicating several times a day by email, basecamp, and IM. This made it easy to talk about changes and ideas. He was also passionate about the project, consistently delivering great results and listening carefully to change requests. Even though Luciano lives in Brazil, working with him felt like having him sitting in the office next door. I couldn’t get the same level of communication from many local candidates!
Design cannot happen in isolation. Find a designer who is amazing at communication, and get a strong leader and communicator on your team to understand design enough to talk to your new hire, and your project will be a success!
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