Think about a state of affairs during which your organization should quickly redesign its cell app to incorporate AI options like picture recognition, customer support chatbots, and residential screens tailor-made to person preferences. Nonetheless, your finances is tight, and your in-house designer hasn’t labored with AI options. Coaching can be costly and time-consuming, and can distract your designer from their core duties.
Given your timeline and restricted finances, you determine to rent a contract designer who makes a speciality of AI and has in depth expertise implementing the options you want. When the freelancer joins your crew, they apply learnings from earlier initiatives and rapidly ship a research-informed prototype. After a quick means of testing and iteration, the brand new options go stay, and the mission concludes on schedule and beneath 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 purchasers equivalent to Royal Financial institution of Canada, Xello, and Rocket Properties Actual Property. I’ve additionally been a part of a number of time-sensitive, cash-strapped initiatives requiring specialised expertise and insights. It’s at all times inspiring and gratifying when my work positively influences my purchasers’ merchandise and their in-house designers.
As extra extremely expert staff flip to freelancing, enterprise leaders are seeing that productiveness and creativity enhance after they work with impartial expertise. Let’s study three of the most important advantages that freelance designers can deliver to your organization.
1. Entry to Rising and Specialised Expertise
Freelance designers are likely to work on quite a few initiatives and infrequently purchase new expertise to deal with their purchasers’ extremely particular design issues. Stewart Pressney, Toptal’s Design Matching Group Lead, says that entry to specialised expertise is without doubt one of the most important advantages of hiring freelance designers. In line with Pressney, impartial specialists are particularly efficient when corporations deliver them on for various levels of the design course of. “You’ll be able to have somebody who’s nice at ideating and developing with ideas move their concepts off to somebody who’s good at implementing and creating pixel-perfect designs,” he says.
Freelancers are additionally a wonderful alternative for exploring cutting-edge tendencies and know-how. For example, you may rent a freelance illustrator who makes a speciality of 3D modeling and rendering to create pictures that make your digital content material extra compelling and simpler to know. Or you would have interaction a freelance UX designer so as to add AR/VR options to your e-commerce app.
Think about generative AI brokers like OpenAI’s ChatGPT: These applied sciences have immense potential to remodel digital services for the higher, however if you happen to’re at a startup or small firm, you might battle to draw design expertise with AI expertise. In such circumstances, impartial expertise could be a terrific solution 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 that 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 business veteran who has partnered with organizations of all sizes.
For example, Moreno was employed by a subsidiary of a distinguished media model to refine the stay beta of its robo-investment app for buying shares and ETFs. The app fees customers based mostly on the funding kits they select. When Moreno got here to the mission, there was an MVP and a small person group, however the display group was clumsy, and the app supplied restricted selections for investing. Most of all, it didn’t mirror the maturity and distinction of the father or mother 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 crew developed subscription-based funding kits. Customers might decide from a number of funding methods, unfold their investments throughout sectors and fund varieties, and determine what share of their portfolio they wished allotted to every. The app’s algorithms then monitored and managed the portfolio, leveraging an AI agent to make sure diversification and safety in opposition to draw back dangers.
The mission 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 stream. And, the choice to deliver larger transparency to the cost mannequin contributed to a 144% enhance in income per person, a 275% enhance in property beneath administration progress, and a 40% enhance in total product progress.
3. Value Financial savings
One motive 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 must 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 through the use of smaller places of work and never paying underutilized full-time staff throughout lulls within the product growth course of.
Companies also can rent impartial specialists to fill short-term roles which might be usually carried out by high-earning staff. For instance, Jake Kahana, a Toptal model designer, lately partnered with an actual property company on an app design mission 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 crew of junior designers, he directed a fast-tracked effort to get the app up and working whereas constructing belief among the many company’s purchasers 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 in a position to 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 in a position to leverage the nuanced expertise of design professionals who deliver contemporary views to initiatives—whereas maintaining prices in examine. 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 other ways of doing issues. You’re in a position to be reactive in a approach an in-house individual won’t 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. “Whenever you do one thing like that, it actually provides you a way of goal.”