Think about a situation by 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 person preferences. Nonetheless, your finances is tight, and your in-house designer hasn’t labored with AI options. Coaching will probably 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 staff, they apply learnings from earlier initiatives and shortly ship a research-informed prototype. After a short 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 situations like this play out for 15 years as a contract UI/UX designer, throughout which I’ve partnered with numerous purchasers 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 abilities and insights. It’s all the time 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 improve once they work with unbiased expertise. Let’s study three of the most important advantages that freelance designers can carry to your organization.
1. Entry to Rising and Specialised Expertise
Freelance designers are likely to work on quite a few initiatives and sometimes purchase new abilities to handle their purchasers’ extremely particular design issues. Stewart Pressney, Toptal’s Design Matching Crew Lead, says that entry to specialised abilities is likely one of the fundamental advantages of hiring freelance designers. In accordance with Pressney, unbiased consultants are particularly efficient when firms carry 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 cross their concepts off to somebody who’s good at implementing and creating pixel-perfect designs,” he says.
Freelancers are additionally a superb alternative for exploring cutting-edge traits and know-how. As an example, you would possibly rent a freelance illustrator who makes a speciality of 3D modeling and rendering to create photographs that make your digital content material extra compelling and simpler to grasp. Or you may have interaction 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 rework 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 abilities. In such instances, unbiased expertise can be a terrific approach to fill the talents hole and reap the velocity, effectivity, and customization AI affords.
2. Elevated Innovation and Creativity
For firms of any dimension, 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 unbiased specialists can uncover organizational inefficiencies that will have hindered earlier design efforts. Having consulted on product improvement 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.
As an example, Moreno was employed by a subsidiary of a outstanding 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 neighborhood, however the display group was clumsy, and the app provided restricted selections for investing. Most of all, it didn’t mirror the maturity and distinction of the mother or father 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 executed. 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 sorts, and determine what share 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 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 degree. His wide-ranging design experiences knowledgeable new options, together with thematic buying and selling choices, an funding dashboard, monetary purpose setting, and an improved onboarding movement. And, the choice to carry larger transparency to the fee mannequin contributed to a 144% improve in income per person, a 275% improve in belongings beneath administration development, and a 40% improve in total product development.
3. Price Financial savings
One motive firms would possibly hesitate to rent freelance designers is perceived value. At face worth, an unbiased expertise’s hourly fee seems greater than an worker’s. However firms hiring freelancers don’t need to pay for 401(ok) 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 firms 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 improvement course of.
Companies may also rent unbiased specialists to fill short-term roles which are usually carried out by high-earning staff. For instance, Jake Kahana, a Toptal model designer, just lately partnered with an actual property company on an app design mission that wanted to be accomplished shortly. The company lacked the funds for a full-time inventive 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 operating whereas constructing belief among the many company’s purchasers that the design imaginative and prescient was grounded in enterprise targets. Kahana entered the position 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 Mission
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 abilities of design professionals who carry contemporary views to initiatives—whereas holding prices in examine. The designers, in the meantime, get to be extra intentional in forging their profession paths, getting access to numerous and significant alternatives that may speed up their skilled development. It’s a win-win scenario.
“As an unbiased designer, you get alternatives to see completely different firms, completely different organizations, and other ways of doing issues. You’re in a position to be reactive in a manner an in-house particular person 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. “Whenever you do one thing like that, it actually provides you a way of goal.”
