Think about a state of affairs during which your organization should quickly redesign its cellular app to incorporate AI options like picture recognition, customer support chatbots, and residential screens tailor-made to consumer preferences. Nonetheless, your finances is tight, and your in-house designer hasn’t labored with AI options. Coaching shall be costly and time-consuming, and can distract your designer from their core duties.
Given your timeline and restricted finances, you resolve to rent a contract designer who focuses on AI and has in depth expertise implementing the options you want. When the freelancer joins your staff, they apply learnings from earlier initiatives and rapidly ship a research-informed prototype. After a quick strategy of testing and iteration, the brand new options go reside, and the challenge concludes on schedule and below finances. This isn’t a dream—I’ve seen eventualities like this play out for 15 years as a contract UI/UX designer, throughout which I’ve partnered with numerous shoppers similar to Royal Financial institution of Canada, Xello, and Rocket Houses Actual Property. I’ve additionally been a part of a number of time-sensitive, cash-strapped initiatives requiring specialised expertise and insights. It’s all the time inspiring and gratifying when my work positively influences my shoppers’ merchandise and their in-house designers.
As extra extremely expert staff flip to freelancing, enterprise leaders are seeing that productiveness and creativity enhance once they work with impartial expertise. Let’s look at three of the largest advantages that freelance designers can carry to your organization.
1. Entry to Rising and Specialised Expertise
Freelance designers are inclined to work on quite a few initiatives and sometimes purchase new expertise to deal with their shoppers’ extremely particular design issues. Stewart Pressney, Toptal’s Design Matching Staff Lead, says that entry to specialised expertise is among the predominant advantages of hiring freelance designers. Based on Pressney, impartial consultants are particularly efficient when corporations carry them on for various levels of the design course of. “You may have somebody who’s nice at ideating and arising with ideas cross their concepts off to somebody who’s good at implementing and creating pixel-perfect designs,” he says.
Freelancers are additionally a superb selection for exploring cutting-edge traits and expertise. For example, you may rent a freelance illustrator who focuses on 3D modeling and rendering to create photographs that make your digital content material extra compelling and simpler to grasp. Or you could possibly interact a freelance UX designer so as to add AR/VR options to your e-commerce app.
Take into account generative AI brokers like OpenAI’s ChatGPT: These applied sciences have immense potential to remodel digital services and products for the higher, however for those who’re at a startup or small firm, you could wrestle to draw design expertise with AI expertise. In such circumstances, impartial expertise can be a terrific approach to fill the abilities hole and reap the velocity, effectivity, and customization AI affords.
2. Elevated Innovation and Creativity
For corporations of any measurement, numerous views are important in discovering efficient options. As Toptal product designer Eric Müller Moreno says, outsiders have “extra freedom and openness to speak about harsh truths,” including that impartial specialists can uncover organizational inefficiencies which will have hindered earlier design efforts. Having consulted on product growth and design technique for Common Music Group, Deloitte, and the United Nations, he has the uncommon perspective of an trade veteran who has partnered with organizations of all sizes.
For example, Moreno was employed by a subsidiary of a outstanding media model to refine the reside beta of its robo-investment app for buying shares and ETFs. The app fees customers primarily based on the funding kits they select. When Moreno got here to the challenge, there was an MVP and a small consumer neighborhood, however the display group was clumsy, and the app supplied restricted selections for investing. Most of all, it didn’t replicate the maturity and distinction of the dad or mum model.
In some methods, the answer was hidden in plain view. “What I made a decision to do was, actually, simply comply with the [parent company’s] model information,” Moreno says. “There was good work performed. It was fairly concise … we simply wanted to raise it.”
To try this, the staff developed subscription-based funding kits. Customers may decide from a number of funding methods, unfold their investments throughout sectors and fund varieties, and resolve what proportion of their portfolio they needed allotted to every. The app’s algorithms then monitored and managed the portfolio, leveraging an AI agent to make sure diversification and safety towards draw back dangers.
The challenge started as a beauty intervention, however Moreno’s perception into the subscription fashions of SaaS merchandise outdoors the fintech sector elevated it to a brand new stage. His wide-ranging design experiences knowledgeable new options, together with thematic buying and selling choices, an funding dashboard, monetary aim setting, and an improved onboarding movement. And, the choice to carry larger transparency to the cost mannequin contributed to a 144% enhance in income per consumer, a 275% enhance in belongings below administration progress, and a 40% enhance in general product progress.
3. Value Financial savings
One purpose corporations may hesitate to rent freelance designers is perceived price. At face worth, an impartial expertise’s hourly fee seems larger than an worker’s. However corporations hiring freelancers don’t need to pay for 401(okay) plans, well being and incapacity insurance coverage, parental and medical go away, inventory choices, or efficiency bonuses. Moreover, most freelance designers work remotely on a per-project foundation, that means corporations can theoretically additionally lower your expenses by utilizing smaller places of work and never paying underutilized full-time workers throughout lulls within the product growth course of.
Companies also can rent impartial specialists to fill short-term roles which can be sometimes carried out by high-earning workers. For instance, Jake Kahana, a Toptal model designer, just lately partnered with an actual property company on an app design challenge that wanted to be accomplished rapidly. The company lacked the funds for a full-time artistic director, however Kahana gave the corporate the strategic management perspective it wanted at a fee that labored for its finances. Overseeing a staff of junior designers, he directed a fast-tracked effort to get the app up and working whereas constructing belief among the many company’s shoppers that the design imaginative and prescient was grounded in enterprise targets. Kahana entered the function with vetted experience and effectively delivered an answer the company wouldn’t have been capable of afford in any other case.
Select the Proper Freelance Designer for Your Subsequent Venture
Whether or not you want a graphic designer, UX researcher, or AI specialist, the advantages of hiring freelance designers are clear: Companies that accomplish that are capable of leverage the nuanced expertise of design professionals who carry recent views to initiatives—whereas retaining prices in verify. The designers, in the meantime, get to be extra intentional in forging their profession paths, having access to numerous and significant alternatives that may speed up their skilled progress. It’s a win-win state of affairs.
“As an impartial designer, you get alternatives to see completely different corporations, completely different organizations, and alternative ways of doing issues. You’re capable of be reactive in a approach an in-house individual may not be. Professionally, I’ve had entry to initiatives I by no means imagined I’d have had,” Moreno says, pointing to his current work on an AI-powered database for the United Nations. “If you do one thing like that, it actually provides you a way of objective.”
