Freelancer, agency or in-house? How to find the right UX help

Your product is growing, but without professional support for the UX you are now reaching your limits?

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Are you beginning to feel that you are no longer able to transfer the growing expectations of your users to your product?

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Perhaps that is why the decision has been made: You need UX expertise.

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But how do you get started?

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• Do you hire someone permanently (in-house)?
• Do you get freelancers to do it?
• Do you work with a specialized agency?

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The answer is not easy, because it depends entirely on your situation.

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Just remember: a young startup needs something very different from a fast-growing scale-up or a large company. Sometimes it's just about bridging a bottleneck. In other cases, you want to anchor UX in your company for the long term.

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And how flexible do you need to be? Do you always need the same support or does it need to be able to grow and shrink quickly depending on the project?

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Every solution has its place. 

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And yes, even though we are an agency ourselves, we are completely honest: sometimes a freelancer or a permanent employee is simply the more sensible choice.

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Let's see when which solution works best.

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UX freelancers: fast, specialized and for clear tasks

Freelancers are great if you need specialized knowledge quickly without a long-term commitment.

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They are ideal for thematic and time-limited tasks:

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• A quick accessibility check (accessibility audit).
• Targeted UX research.
• Texts for the user interface (UX writing).

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Many companies use freelancers to fill gaps in the team at short notice. Or to bring in a breath of fresh air. You know what it's like: sometimes the internal team is "operationally blind". That's where an outside perspective can help.

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The big advantage over internal employees is that you only pay for what you do. No fixed costs for office, training or salary. Freelancers are ready to go quickly, are used to new working environments and can be flexibly adapted. The latter is great if the budget is tight or the UX requirements fluctuate greatly.

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But beware: A freelancer is not a team! UX is a broad field: research, strategy, design, testing.

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It is very unlikely that one person is an expert in each of these areas. We at brightside Studio don't have such an all-knowing genius in our team :-) 

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Think of it like a Swiss army knife: Handy for a lot of things, and somehow there's a checkmark at the end of the task. But if you want to complete a specialized task cleanly, you need the right professional tools.

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With a freelancer, that's exactly what you get. They are technically strong, but often purely "executive". Finding a freelancer who also has a sense of business and thinks strategically about your goals is difficult.

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Furthermore, freelancers often work on several projects. Their knowledge? It's quickly gone after the project ends. You shouldn't underestimate that.

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Agency versus freelancer?

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Freelancers are great if you want to move a topic forward quickly. An agency is better if you need several specialist areas or the project is complex. 

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If a freelancer drops out, the project hangs. 

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An agency not only has a well-established team with backup, but usually also experience with larger brands and projects.

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Despite this, a freelancer can integrate into the team much more directly and personally. The emphasis is on "can". Of course, not all freelancers are the same and not all agencies are the same.

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In short: Freelancers are perfect for acute, one-off support and as a sparring partner. However, they often reach their limits when it comes to long-term UX strategies or complex, continuous product development.

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Inhouse UX: close to the product and long-term expertise

A permanent team makes sense if UX is not a one-off project, but a permanent part of your product development.

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The advantage is obvious: A permanent team knows your product, the market and your customers inside out. While the agency can also sit at the table as a sparring partner during feature planning, the in-house team is also involved in all-hands and all kinds of cross-functional meetings and is therefore much more deeply interwoven into the business.

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Whoever builds up UX internally also invests in the company culture. The teams work together with product management and development on a daily basis. This creates a common understanding: decisions are made user-centered and fact-based. This makes you more independent in the long term.

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The catch: An in-house team is expensive. Recruiting, training and salaries are fixed costs. And that remains the case, even when things slow down. Not to mention the fact that you should also bring someone into the team who can manage the designer, act as a link to other departments and is familiar with product development. This could be a product manager, product owner or head of product. It would be risky to hire a designer without supervision, as they may focus on the wrong things, set the wrong priorities or simply deliver poor results if they are not properly guided.

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Also, as with the freelancer, the catch here is that the UX field is huge. If you start with just one role, you will quickly lack important skills such as research or prototyping. If you bring several experts into the team, you run the risk of the designer having little work on their plate in research phases and the researcher in design phases.

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In comparison to an agency: Internal teams bring proximity and daily speed. Agencies bring a lot of experience from different industries and can quickly add specialists. The aforementioned product manager/owner is already integrated into the team here.

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So when should you set up an in-house team?

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We say: If you have a product-oriented company in which UX is a key pillar of business success. And what's more: if you are in a financial position to bear the costs even in quiet phases.

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UX agency: broad expertise, speed and an outside perspective

An agency is often the right choice if you need quick results and not all skills are available internally.

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The difference? The freelancer brings a skill, the in-house team is deeply rooted. The agency delivers the entire range of UX disciplines. Everything from a single source.

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• Research
• Concept and design
• Prototyping and testing

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The team can be put together flexibly. That saves time. It's like an orchestra: everyone is a professional, but it's the perfect teamwork that makes the music.

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Agencies know typical mistakes from their many projects. They bring best practices with them and are great at avoiding operational blindness. For important, complex products, this objective view is crucial.

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Also important: The risk of downtime is lower. If someone drops out, someone else steps in. Quality does not depend on a single person. Personnel management and illness do not become your problem. And as with a freelancer, you have no costs for onboarding the designer and their tools. 

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When is an agency not ideal? 

If you are planning to build up your own, constantly busy team in the long term. Then the in-house approach is usually better.

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Agencies are strongest for ambitious projects: the revision of a product, a new strategic feature, or support for important presentations. A good agency not only delivers, but also passes on knowledge. This allows you to grow internally in the long term.

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Conclusion: If you need expert know-how quickly, want to minimize risks and have an important project coming up, a specialist UX agency is a strong partner.

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