The success of your business depends on the mutual efforts of each of your team members. A designer is not an exception. You need this specialist in your team as they are responsible for making products useful, simple, and enjoyable to use. They work to improve the product’s look and feel so that users can easily find its value.
But how to evaluate a designer and understand you’re hiring the right person before they even start working with you?
As a UI/UX design agency for SaaS, we’ve been on both sides: those who hire, and those who are hired. Further in the text, we will share our experience on how to identify a good UI/UX designer, discuss what mistakes employers often make when evaluating designers, and more. Additionally, at the end of this article, you’ll find a free downloadable checklist that will help you assess UI/UX designers.
Mistakes you make when evaluating designer
During our more than 7-year experience of providing product design services, we’ve noticed that there are some typical things new clients tend to do before signing a contract, but that are actually not effective.
So, before we think of how to evaluate design quality, let’s see what mistakes recruiters tend to make when hiring UI/UX specialists.
- Judging the designer’s style.
When you search through the Internet for some tips on evaluating potential designers, the first thing you will see on many web designs is that they recommend you carefully examine the designer’s portfolio to understand if you like their style.
We completely disagree with this advice. First of all, good product design doesn’t depend on the designer’s style. Good UI/UX designers are not artists who apply the same visual style to every project. Whether they're working on a SaaS dashboard, a landing page design, or a mobile application, their job is to choose the right design elements and visual elements for a particular business context. They provide a service and should create designs that reflect our business logic, your users' needs, industry trends, and and other project requirements.
For example, if Meta searched for a designer, do you think they would search for a person with works that look just like a Facebook interface? Probably not, they would look for a designer who is able to understand their business and work with references, style guides, and design systems.
A designer who created an excellent logo design for one company may not necessarily be the best fit for another project. Strong design work is about solving problems, not repeating the same design idea across different products.
Each project is unique, there can’t be a universal design style that fits them all. So, there’s little use in judging a designer’s style.
- Asking for a wrong test task.
In our opinion, a test task is the most objective way for an employer to evaluate a designer. However, to get a reliable impression of the designer’s work, you need to choose the correct test task. It shouldn’t be too long, not to spend too many resources on hiring, but big enough to see if the candidate is competent.
Commonly, employers ask to design one screen for their application or site as a test. However, such a task won’t give you enough information to evaluate your candidates. A separate screen design can look aesthetically pleasing, but it won't show you how users move through the product, whether the interface contains clear focal points, or whether the designer understands the broader user journey, and what will happen afterward when they click a certain button. That is, a screen doesn’t show if a designer understands your business context or the needs of your target audience.
That’s why in Eleken, we offer our clients a free three days trial. During the trial, we can create a complete user flow, a customer journey map, a UX audit, or another task that proves the person you’re going to work with understands your vision, your users, and the logic of your SaaS.
- Asking for a portfolio of a specific designer when hiring a design agency.
When hiring a design agency, it means that there’re many designers that can be assigned to your project ( you don’t always have the possibility to choose one). How to evaluate them in such a case? Usually, our clients want to see a portfolio with all case studies of the exact specialist that’s going to work on their project. But this approach is wrong, and here’s why.
Imagine there are four designers:
- designer A had worked on one big project for a year.
- designer B had worked on four small projects during the last year.
- designer C was the only designer in the team when working on a project.
- designer D worked as a part of a big design team.
Will the portfolios of these four designers and their experience differ? Yes.
Does that mean that one is more experienced than the other? No.
And again, analyzing a portfolio of a specific designer won’t help you when hiring a design agency. Instead, take a look at the agency’s case studies to understand their general approach to design and ask to complete a small test task to see if your potential hire understands your needs and if you feel comfortable communicating with them.
Now that we know what mistakes to avoid when evaluating design specialists, let’s discuss the aspects you need to take into account to make an objective and qualified choice.
Components of successful hiring
Reviewing CVs, portfolios, and completed test tasks won’t be efficient if you analyze them alone. That’s why, the first thing we’d recommend you to do when choosing a designer, is to hold a video interview where you can ask open-ended questions that will help you understand if a candidate possesses the needed hard and soft skills.
Further on in the article, we will discuss what UI/UX designer skills you should pay attention to, and how to figure out if a designer has them. But before that, there’s one more important thing you should do before even opening designers’ CVs.
Define what you expect to receive at the outcome
Hiring designers to “make the product stand out”, or because you “want the app to look beautiful” may lead to a useless waste of resources. That’s why, as the first step, think of what exactly you want the designer to work on, and how it aligns with your business goals.
- Identify what your business needs are.
- Define what user problems and needs the product should address, and therefore what features it should perform.
- Learn what similar apps are on the market and how your product can stand out from the competitors.
Without a clear understanding of business goals, teams often lose focus and evaluate designers based on personal preferences rather than measurable outcomes.
In other words, develop the design strategy, which is defined by research. This process doesn’t necessarily require a designer, only an in-depth understanding of your product.
With those insights in mind, come up with a list of deliverables and design requirements (they can change over time) and start looking through CVs. And remember, the more specifications you give to your potential designer, the easier it will be to choose the right candidate and the fewer challenges you'll face when you cooperate.
Now let’s move to key indicators that can help you evaluate designer qualities.
Hard skills
This and further sections contain criteria for UI/UX designers’ evaluation. You can check if your potential design partner meets these criteria during the interview by asking questions, analyzing projects in their portfolio, or discussing a test task.
A strong designer contributes not only to creating visually appealing interfaces but also to the overall product development process, ensuring that business goals, user needs, and technical requirements remain aligned.
Let’s start with a list of essential methods that UX designers commonly use during a product design process to deliver effective design solutions.
Product discovery
Product discovery is aimed at understanding your customers' problems, needs, and real-life challenges before design and development begin. Before moving forward with a design concept, designers need research to answer user needs and business questions before moving forward. Using these findings, you can build software that most people want to use and pay for. It also helps a designer to correctly prioritize features and set up for product excellence.
Product discovery should be an integral part of the UI/UX design process, so when evaluating your potential hire’s skills, pay special attention to the following:
- User research
UI/UX designers use data from studying users to approve or reject assumptions, define design opportunities, and develop an understanding of how people interact with a product. There’s a variety of user research techniques, including user interviews, surveys, focus groups, card sorting, usability testing, and more. In practice, designers often combine several research methods to gain a complete understanding of user needs, knowing that choosing the right method for the problem matters more than following a rigid checklist.
To evaluate the designer’s awareness of the importance of research, ask them what user research techniques they used in their projects and how they influenced their design decisions.
- Competitor analysis
By analyzing existing solutions on the market, designers can define what they are missing so that you can turn it into a competitive advantage, or vice versa, what features users expect to find in your software because they're common for this kind of app and align with audience expectations.
To evaluate this skill, ask a potential candidate if they use this research method in their work and note how they translate research findings into design decisions, as well as how they achieve specific outcomes and what affects these outcomes.
- UX audit
The goal of a UX audit is to define existing usability problems of a product through research and analysis. With its help designers can determine critical gaps in the user journey that prevents customers from making the target actions they’re supposed to take. This skill is an important factor to assess if you need help with product redesign. It can be also helpful when redesigning an existing product or improving conversion rates.
The best way to evaluate this criterion is to make UX audit a test task. Ask a candidate to analyze a piece of your product, and come up with possible improvements.
- Product structure
A well-thought-out product structure makes your app intuitive and reduces the time and effort users spend to find what they need. It should group related content into a clear group and keep screens organized. The layout of screens, navigation patterns, and information architecture should make sense to users from the very first interaction, with related elements in the right place for what users expect.
To plan product structure, UI/UX designers create user flows by organizing and labeling each user’s step toward completing a task. Then they can start mapping user experience with the help of wireframing.
To check if your candidate can create a consistent product structure, ask them to design a certain user flow as a test task (be ready to give a designer enough time to complete a task).
Then ask them to guide you through the flow. For more details ask the following questions:
- What happens if the user does *certain action*?
- Why did you choose a *certain solution*?
Prototyping
Prototypes show you how the app will work and look, but most importantly, it allows designers to test their ideas with potential users.
To evaluate this skill, ask a designer if they create clickable prototypes, and what tools they use for this purpose.
Testing
A variety of testing methods, like A/B testing, benchmarking, and others, allow designers to validate the effectiveness of their design decisions, check the product's usability, see how users interact with a product, and reveal places of friction that need improvements. Testing also shows whether a product is actually usable, not just visually polished.
Ask a candidate to tell you about a case from their experience when they had to test their ideas, how they dealt with it, how they did a review of the results, and how they used those findings to improve the outcome.
Visual design and landing page design
Colors, fonts, photos, images, illustrations, and other visual elements are all parts of your product. When combined thoughtfully, these design elements create an aesthetically pleasing experience while supporting usability and business goals as well as creating a consistent brand experience, and original brand assets, including logo work, may need to be distinctive enough to support trademark protection. We fix inconsistencies and build a unified visual language to help you create a scalable product.
Design quality can be evaluated in layers. At the surface level, you can assess visual consistency, typography, the use of colors, use of space, and whether a large focal point creates clear hierarchy. In graphic design, attention to detail in visual presentation also shows how polished the work is. Looking deeper, you should evaluate whether design decisions support usability, reinforce the brand, help users complete their tasks efficiently, and account for users' emotions. Visual elements should agree with each other and support one clear message.
Ask designers to walk you through the breakdown of an existing user interface and explain how they may enhance it. Additionally, you can ask if a designer has experience working with design systems.
Responsiveness and accessibility
UI/UX designers should be able to create a user experience beneficial for everyone who uses the software. Responsive design means that your app will look and feel the same at all device screen sizes. Accessible design means that users with disabilities or situational difficulties will find your app easy to use.
Accessible design acknowledges that not everyone interacts with software in the same way. Designers must consider different abilities, devices, and usage contexts when creating interfaces.
To assess these skills, ask a designer how they can make the product accessible to various user types.
To sum up, when evaluating the design approach of your potential design partner, the most important thing is to ensure that a candidate bases each of their design choice on research and users’ needs rather than on aesthetics. Ask your potential designer to guide you through their design process and pay attention to the methods we described above.
Soft skills
Here we will talk about personal qualities and interpersonal skills that are important for finding a connection with users and effectively cooperating with a team.
- Critical thinking
UI/UX design is really about solving problems. Therefore, designers need to use critical thinking to find viable solutions for user problems.
To evaluate this quality, ask if a certain must-have feature in one of their previous projects is important and why, and see how versatile their vision is.
- Empathy
Being aware that you design software to solve someone's real problems helps designers better understand the world from the user's perspective in the moment of interaction.
Good designers talk a lot about people who use their products. Instead of focusing only on colors, interfaces, and other things related to aesthetics, they pay attention to user goals, frustrations, and behaviors.
So, when a candidate tells you about their previous projects, pay attention if they mention what needs and problems users of that product had.
- The ability to communicate
Designers don't do their job alone, and product design is a team sport, so it's essential to make sure your potential candidate seeks input from teammates and stakeholders and can explain how the design they create works to users, the product manager, developers, and other designers in a way people can quickly follow with the eye.
If a designer can clearly communicate their thoughts to you during the interview, they will also be able to communicate with other people well.
- The ability to listen and take criticism well
In the course of your cooperation, you’ll have to share your vision and feedback regularly. So it’s very important to have a designer who’s a good listener and who’s open to criticism.
To check if your candidate has this quality, pay attention to the way they react to your feedback on a test task or to their previous works.
- Proactivity
A designer shouldn’t be just a blind doer. Apart from being a good listener, it’s important that your future design partner could make their own decisions and justify their opinion when needed.
To assess this quality, set a test task and see how your potential designer presents you with their ideas.
That's all for the list of skills to evaluate a UI/UX designer. Study and adjust it to suit your needs, and start building the product design team of your dreams. And to ensure you don’t miss anything important, here’s a downloadable UI/UX designer evaluation checklist.
To sum up
Good UI/UX designers are those who listen to your vision, understand user needs, and create design work that balances aesthetics, functionality, and business objectives. But they can also make their own decisions clearly explaining what lies behind them.
If we had to give several most important recommendations on a designer skills assessment they would be the following:
- Define why you need a UI/UX designer before starting the hiring process.
- Don’t sign a contract with a designer/design agency without talking to a candidate face-to-face or camera-to-camera.
- As a test task, ask them to create a user flow, conduct a UX audit, or do anything that can help you make sure the person you want to work with understands your product’s logic.
- Pay attention if you feel comfortable communicating with your potential employee.
And if you need to quickly find a devoted design partner, Eleken’s designers are all professionals with experience of working with SaaS solutions. Schedule a call with us, and let’s discuss the details of your project.
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