The options can think of are:
1) Hire a full time designer who only produces sketches. I think this is a bit too expensive for us at this stage (3-4 person startup) but I'm open to dissenting opinions.
2) Hire a UI/UX developer who can do design + code in our react stack.
3) Outsource design sketches to a contracting firm, and have a separate frontend developer.
Which approach has worked best in your experiences? I prefer (2) but have no idea how hard it is to hire someone who can do both design + front end code.
Open to anything right now and a little desperate, a clean UI is our main blocker to launch.
The thing is - UX can make or break an app. It really does matter. But you can end up wasting a freakton of time trying to get it perfect on day one. I've literally seen designers take front-end teams down 1-2 year rabbithole trying to get it perfect before launch. And I've seen managers eat it up, thinking that if they just have the right UX, the market will flock to them. But no - it doesn't work like that.
You are looking for "Good enough." at this point. To get there, give pilot users something to complain about - let them tell you what they need. Let them show you where it feels painful. And listen to them. Then fix it. Truth be told, that is exactly what most designers will do anyway. The trick is to find the users who are good pilot users - ones who will talk to you instead of walking away. Not only will they guide you to the right answers as well as many designers, they'll feel personally invested in the process and help find more people to work with.
In my case (startup currently consisting of just myself), I have a lovely designer who I contract with and I’m able to do just enough UI work to get by between projects with her. I highly recommend the “Refactoring UI” book for giving developers the skills to do the bare minimum of UI design (it’s relatively short and gives actionable principles). there’s no substitute for having someone who really (tries to) sit in the users shoes and figure out what a good (minimal!) experience should be.
If you use option 3, have them give you 3 deliverables,
1. the design files,
2. Output html if possible and
3. Get a style guide for the site.
You probably know this already but most of the time the HTML output you receive will be horrible adobe generated code, but I've found it convenient many times as it still gives you a way to snag all the styles without rebuilding them all right away. When you hire a good frontend person they will rework the styles anyway, so worry less about perfection at this stage and just get the site up and functional would be my 2 cents.
Someone with a sense for design, UX and API design should
- Create well designed small components (Button, Link, Input, ...)
- Create well designed bigger components to compose small ones (List, Box, TabMenu, Expander, Modal, ...)
The rest of the team can now just build bigger components by composing existing ones. Things will look nice and consistent without too much effort. Fine-tuning can be done with an UI/UX affine teammate.
It sounds super simple and success highly depends on the quality of the components you use as the base. We have great success with this approach. It also empowers developers who don't have a feel for design to build good looking UIs by default.
We have that problem in our backlog; it's an ML platform but CSS is not why most ML projects fail.
We make it do something valuable, then make it pretty.
We researched several options, took a stab ourselves, and eventually found an excellent firm to build our brand/style & more. They can do brand design/app design/implementation. Additionally, we found an excellent frontend engineer that knows great design. I have a couple of design resources I can share as well. Email in bio.