There are a few significant differences between a UX designer and a UX consultant.
The UX designer is much more interested in solving your design problems. The UX designer is your new best friend if you’re looking to redesign your webpage for a fresh and bold new look to maximize traffic.
On the flip side, a UX consulting company will be much more invested in the business issues your brand might have. They’ll use their industry experience to advise a redesign of a page to maximize your profit.
Think of it like the difference between a nutritionist and a personal trainer.
The nutritionist will give you a diet plan catered around you with the specific goal of general health, and the personal trainer will aim to swap around your diet to maximize gains.
Both practices are goal-oriented. It just comes down to what your company needs.
Knowing the Need for UX Consultants
No business is perfect. There are just too many variables for any one company to consider. 5.03 billion variables, to be more accurate. Every person online has the potential to visit your business – what can you do to stand out?
Broaden your perspective.
Take a look at your product from a top-down view, and note the strengths and weaknesses of your business to fix them. The problem with this is that the more time you spend immersed in something, the more you lose perspective on it.
For Example, Common UX Strengths Could Be:
- A well-functioning website
- Easy-to-read CTAs
- A reliable user base.
And Common UX Weaknesses Could Be
- Poorly researched UX strategy
- Hard-to-see CTAs
- Inconsistent presentation
In this case, it might be hard to spot these issues. Being in the thick of things takes perspective away from you.
Imagine if you were to spend several hours writing an article about UX consultancy. At the moment, it could look completely normal until someone else takes a look. Then all of the glaring issues come to light, just like a typo that subtly skips by.
Everyone can be susceptible to this phenomenon. It’s especially difficult to resist if you have the “curse of knowledge,” a phenomenon that complicates simplifying ideas because you have knowledge of a subject and can’t remember what it’s like to not have that information.
This idea is further cemented by the fact that, as a business, you know how you operate from start to finish. You’ve already connected Point A to Point B, whereas your visitors have no choice but to start at the beginning.
The way forward might not be readily apparent, and confirmation bias might get in your way, which is where a UX consultant comes in. They will give you a fresh outlook on your business by sorting through errors with a fine-tooth comb and telling you exactly what to change to maximize your profit.
What You Can Expect From a UX Consultation
If you decide to hire a UX consultant to buff up your business, their process is specifically tailored to pumping up your numbers.
Up first, they’ll address the low-hanging fruit in the way of creating larger designs.
Auditing
With your team working alongside the consultant, they’ll aim to find every nook and cranny that needs touching up before any big ticket items get fixed.
Picture a CTA (or call-to-action) button that has the specific purpose of persuading your visitors to check out their carts. For some reason or another, it’s no longer bringing in sales.
The consultant will partner up to determine why that button has such a low conversion rate and how to change it to match the customer’s expectation.
Audience Identification
To complete the audit stage, the UX consultant will become more familiar with your brand and the target audience. Surveys, user interviews, and varying analytics are reviewed to get an idea of who visits your website and why.
From this stage, the team might find that the CTA from before matches the color scheme of the background, resulting in a significant number of users scrolling past it.
The UX consultant uses this information to create a broader understanding of your visitors and recommend changes toward a chosen demographic.
Prototyping
Looking at the data, the CTA is the most significant contributor to a loss of sales.
Here is a decision point. What has to happen to fix the problems like this?
After some time, the UX consultant will bring up a prototype of varying designs, color schemes, and implementation strategies to maximize visibility.
It’s up to you as the owner to make the call if it fits your brand identity. For example, perhaps the proposed button is bright pink, and you’d prefer your site to be entirely blue.
This is perfectly alright! Prototyping might take one try, or it might take four. Ultimately, every iteration will be that much closer to the perfect look.
Implementation
Once you have the result, the UX consultant will help you use the new designs effectively and integrate them into your business strategies.
The consultant will drum up a long-term plan to reach the end goal alongside the updated designs.
You can expect to find a few things in this long-term plan like:
- How to complement and effectively use the new design to increase conversion rates
- Where to best improve the site to build off the newly created design.
- What to look for in analyzing the success rate of the new elements on your site.
Returning to the reduction in sales example, they’ll create a plan on how to use the new CTA, where to place it on the site, and a few guidelines on how to build elements around it to reach the goal of increasing your conversion rates.
The Price of Change
The term “spend money to make money” is reasonably literal in terms of UX, especially since Uxcam estimates that every $1 spent will generally result in a return of $100.
A 9,990% return on investment is nearly unheard of in the market industry. To put it into perspective, the ROI of a refurbished used car is around 13%.
To put that into perspective, 13 miles from Los Angeles will get you to the beach. 9,990 miles will get you to Russia.
As an example, our partners at Digital Position reported a 133% increase in performance for the year, despite the updates being rolled out near the end of Q4.
UX can be a significant turning point in a business. Get the most mileage out of your site by checking out if your site needs a UX design overhaul.
