Design Your Way to Success: Tips for Hiring a Top-Notch UI Designer

We've all seen designs that make us stop for a couple of seconds. There's something about it that makes it classy, captivating and unique. It feels natural and paints a visual story of what the brand stands for.

If you want these aesthetics for your business, you need to get a glimpse of UI design, how to find and reach out to stellar talent and bring home the creatives.

With businesses competing for audience's attention over the internet, an excellent design can not only catch their eye, it can tempt them to know more about your brand, visit your site and maybe even get in touch with you.

Since a good design can up your goodwill, you need a pro who takes it seriously. Find these purple squirrels for your business, with Hire Quotient's hiring guide. Explore what UI can do for your business, why UI designers are a worthy addition to your team and what to look for when selecting them. Let us paint a vivid picture for you.

Is UI Design All That Important?

In a nutshell, yes. User Interface (UI) design is crucial for a growing business in the ever expanding digital era. As businesses scale and expand their footprint, it's increasingly important to ensure that customers have a positive experience interacting with the brand online.

UI design is critical for enhancing the user experience (UX) of a digital product by making it an intuitive and user-friendly interface that is easy to navigate.

It's not an exaggeration to say UI can also help to increase conversion rates. By designing interfaces that make it easy for customers to complete tasks such as purchasing a product or signing up for a service with minimum steps and maximum clarity, businesses can improve their conversion rates and generate more revenue.

If you're building a brand from scratch or rebranding or refreshing your look, amping up your UI design is crucial. A consistent brand image across all digital touchpoints makes it easy for customers to seek you and find you. Seeing your design frequently also grows on them and firmly registers your brand on their minds.

As a result, it helps your business stay ahead of the competition. Whom do you think a customer will choose? A business that brings them all the info they need on a clear, classy template or the ones with a stale, mundane design?

UI design is also critical for improving accessibility. Staying ahead of the curve also means making things easier for your customers, like no one ever has before. A fantastic UI design can help customers access and benefit from its products and services with a very few clicks.

How Do UI Designers Make These Happen?

UI designers create digital interfaces for websites, applications, and other digital products. They take cognizance of user behavior and use that information to design interfaces that are easy to use and offer a seamless user experience.

UI Designers can help you narrate a compelling brand identity for your business by selecting design elements, colors, and typography that align with your brand's message and goals.

They research design trends, competitors' designs, what top performing brands have in common and keep up with industry developments. This helps them modify and bring out a design strategy that's focused on immediate and long-term business goals.

Armed with this rich information, UI Designers pair it with design principles to create interfaces that make it easy for users to respond to the design and accomplish the tasks intended by the business, ultimately leading to increased conversion rates and revenue for the business.

The best UI designer comes with a handy toolkit to create amazing designs for your business. They make it a point to conduct research and analysis, create wireframes and prototypes, and test the interface with users. Instead of feeding designs without taking feedback, a skilled UI designer does a dipstick test before going full-on with the design approach.

Successful UI designers know the power of one and make sure to collaborate with other members of the design and development team to ensure that the final product meets the business's goals and objectives.

Hiring Creatives: What’s the Catch?

Design is subjective, and what one person finds visually appealing may not be the same for another. This subjectivity makes it difficult to evaluate the quality of a UI designer's work objectively. Therefore, hiring managers like you must have a clear understanding of your business goals and brand identity to assess whether the UI designer's portfolio aligns with your needs or not.

Creatives like UI designers come from diverse backgrounds and have unique skill sets that may not always align with a specific project or team. It can be challenging to identify the skills and experience you are looking for and find candidates who can demonstrate those skills.

They also often value their autonomy and may have their own unique ideas and perspectives, which can create challenges when it comes to collaboration. While collaboration is essential to the success of a project, businesses need to balance this with individualism and ensure that their creatives have the freedom to express their ideas.

A UI designer's portfolio is the primary way to evaluate their work. However, comparing different portfolios or evaluating subjectively can be misleading, especially if the designers haven't worked with your industry, or created designs similar to your requirements.

Hiring managers must review the portfolio carefully to determine if the designer's style and approach align with the business's goals. There's a lot at stake here and given that design is a creative and qualitative work which you can put a score of tag on, you need at least a few goals or standard metrics to help you guide through the filtering process.

Even for a niche and subjective domain like UI design, Hire Quotient can generate accurate job descriptions and metrics that can help you attract the most relevant candidates.

Essential Qualities Your Design Unicorn Needs to Have

Given our expertise in hiring for several domains, we have curated a list of must-have qualities you need to check for, when you're screening applications for the UI designer role. Regardless of whether the candidate has worked for the same or similar industry as yours, these pointers are crucial in determining how successful their designs will be.

1. Design Skills

It's the bread and butter of the role. Design skills are crucial for hiring a UI designer because they help create interfaces that are not only visually appealing but also functional and easy to use. A good UI designer must be able to create designs that are both aesthetically pleasing and user-friendly, which requires a broad range of design skills.

An intelligent mix of color theory, typography, and composition can create aesthetic interfaces and surreal designs.

A competent UI designer designs interactions between the user and the interface, such as buttons, forms, and menus. A seamless, hassle-free interaction between screens and buttons helps create a good impression on customers. On the other hand, clumsy or unrelated or unresponsive pages or elements can make a customer lose interest in a jiffy.

Now, this is a winning quality in a UI designer. Extensive knowledge of users, conducting market research using primary and secondary methodologies and techniques make their designs more relevant, appealing and are more likely to induce action.

Another key quality of a UI designer is their ability to organize information in a way that is easy to navigate and understand. Brevity is everything when it comes to captivating customer attention and a good UI design does just that.

If you're a startup just starting out on your branding journey and you have your fundamentals in place, you may want to test if your visuals get you the desired response. The UI designer you hire at this point must be able to create interactive prototypes that allow users to test and provide feedback on the interface design. This helps you modify and create better design interfaces.

How to Assess Design Skills?

• Reviewing a UI designer's portfolio is a good way to assess their design skills. The portfolio mostly demonstrates a wide range of design skills, such as visual design, interaction design, and information architecture.
  
  
• Providing a design exercise is another great way to assess a UI designer's design skills. The exercise should be relevant to the actual tasks they'll take up if hired and must allow the designer to showcase their design skills.
  
  
• A design thinking interview is also a unique and effective way to assess a UI designer's design skills. You can ask questions that allow the designer to demonstrate their understanding of design principles and their ability to solve design problems.
  
  
• If you are willing to take a certain calculated risk, you may create design critique as a way to assess a UI designer's ability to receive feedback and incorporate it into their design. The designer should be able to explain their design decisions and take constructive criticism.

2. Creativity

Creativity is a crucial skill to consider when hiring a UI designer because it directly impacts the quality and effectiveness of the design. A creative UI designer can come up with out-of-the-world designs that can captivate users, build following and drive conversions like crazy.

There have been so many instances from the past when a change in design has started an avalanche of interaction or traffic for the brands. Visual storytelling is a powerful tool and a creative UI designer can make your design feel natural, and intuitive. In fact, unique and interesting designs even tempt users to keep a tab on your socials , check you out constantly and recommend your page to those in need.

Get an UI designer who can make this happen for you.

How to Assess Creativity?

• Giving a design challenge to the designer can assess their out-of-the-box thinking skills. Provide them with a specific design problem and ask them to come up with a solution.
  
  
• A real-life situation, or a job simulation task where a designer needs to communicate an overly simple or complex idea to customers as succinctly as possible, with their design, can fire creativity and get you insights on the suitability of the candidate.

3. Attention to Detail

A designer who lacks attention to detail may miss important design elements, leading to a confusing or frustrating user experience.

On the other hand, a UI designer who pays attention to every little detail does a commendable job and ensures consistency across the interface, from the color palette to the placement of elements. This consistency leads to a smoother user experience.

Details can make a big difference in the overall clarity of the interface. A designer who pays attention to detail will ensure that each element is clear and easy to understand, reducing the risk of confusion for users.

Attention to detail is critical in creating an aesthetically pleasing interface. Small design elements can make a big difference in the overall appearance of the interface and can impact the user's perception of your business.

How to Assess Attention to Detail?

• Conduct user testing on the designer's past work to evaluate how well their designs work in practice. Look for areas where users may get confused or frustrated due to a lack of attention to detail.
  
  
• Give the designer a design exercise that requires attention to detail, such as creating a UI design for a complex form. Conduct a one-way design interview, wherein you connect with the designer, give them the design brief, sit back and watch how they go about creating it. Notice if the designer takes note of every small thing, or do they tend to give in to cognitive bias and ignore certain aspects of the brief as being trivial. You don't want that to happen realtime. It's best to check before hiring.

4. Problem Solving Skills

Problem-solving is a critical skill that every UI designer should possess. This is because UI designers are responsible for creating designs that become the first touchpoint with customers and have to solve users' problems while meeting business goals, to really make an impact.

Hiring a UI designer who lacks problem-solving skills can result in ineffective designs that only showcase an array of designs with no meaning or context to it.

A UI designer with strong problem-solving skills will be able to think critically and come up with an architecture and interaction model that resonates with the target audience.

UI designers must also be in sync with the current strategy and objectives of the company, for them to craft a design that solves customer's problems from the current strategy perspective.

How to Assess Problem Solving Skills

Ask the UI designer to walk you through their design process. Look for evidence of critical thinking and problem-solving skills.

Provide the UI designer with a design challenge with all probable contingencies and see what best solution they can come up with. You can also administer creative design assessments to get a laser sharp report detailing their skillsets.

You can also take advantage of the interview to probe the UI designer candidate on areas that focus on their problem-solving skills. For example, "Can you describe a time when you had to solve a difficult design problem?" or "Can you walk me through how you approached a design challenge in the past?" can prompt the candidates to narrate their approach to problems.

5. Behavioral Traits to Look Out For

UI designers need to have excellent communication skills to collaborate effectively with other team members, stakeholders, and clients. They should be able to articulate their design ideas clearly and be open to feedback and suggestions.

They should also be adaptable and be able to work in a dynamic and changing environment. At work, situations may arise when they have to drop their current task and look into a priority design, or discard an entire design because it didn't resonate with the strategy.

Since design is a creative process and requires a lot of thought, energy and effort to create, they may feel bad or annoyed when sudden changes come up. How they communicate the value of the ones they created and suggest how they can improve, while also gracefully acknowledging any oversights can ensure a smooth working relationship.

You need a person like that on your team. Make sure you check for these qualities before you make the offer.

UI design is a rapidly evolving field, and designers need to continuously learn and keep up with the latest trends and technology. A good UI designer should be passionate about their work and committed to ongoing learning and professional development. That's how they stay relevant to the industry and also project you as a leader. It's essential to assess their willingness to learn and grow.

Hiring Top-Notch UI Designers Made Possible With Hire Quotient

With Hire Quotient's advanced, AI-powered technology, you can now reach out to cold and warm candidates across the globe. Get the most trusted recommendations from your contacts, include the candidates to your candidate pool, conduct a complete screening of all candidates and generate custom insights that tell you the truth about your inclusivity, hiring effectiveness and quality.

Filter these credible candidates through laser sharp screening and cut to the chase with a cream layer of candidates.

Save plenty of time by subjecting these candidates to a thorough, relevant skill assessment to weed out misfits.

Once you have the best candidates at hand, administer one-way interviews and job simulation exercises to see if they're actually capable of handling day-to-day requirements.

Armed with surprisingly accurate data and insights on candidate performance, choose your unicorn and up your design game.