Did you know, as many as 79% of people who visit a site and don’t like what they see, go back and search for another website (most likely one of your competitors).

In light of this, UI design has never been so important. If you don’t boast the necessary skills to do this yourself, you’ll need to hire a professional to handle this for you.

So, if you want to find top-quality talent, heed the advice below.

1. Don’t Limit Yourself

When we say, ‘don’t limit yourself,’ what we really mean is, don’t restrict your search to just word-of-mouth recommendations, employee referral schemes, and sifting through your LinkedIn connections. These were the traditional ways of hiring talent. Although this is still can still be an effective strategy, there’s nothing wrong with diversifying your network by exploring online hiring platforms like Dribble and Behance to find a UI designer.

Ideally, you want to find a platform that boasts an excellent reputation for their UI designers. If you shut yourself off to these routes, there’s a good chance you’ll neglect some of the best talents out there.

In fact, some of the top companies in the world like Paypal use these platforms to find top talent.

Top Tip: Head to Google and search ‘best freelance networks for UI design’. This is probably the best way to kickstart your search.

2. Know What You Want

Any UI designer worth their salt will know how to provide customers with a premium user experience. However, for a designer to be able to do their job correctly, you’ll need a clear vision of what you want. Otherwise, you’ll find it difficult to sift through potential candidates.

3. Understand What Makes a Great UI Designer

This leads us swimmingly onto our next point, for you to know what you want, you need to understand what makes an excellent UI designer.

UI designer’s do many things, but their primary task is to understand the components of a product and/or service and how this relates to your audience’s needs. It’s then down to the designer to position your brand via your website in such a way that it connects with your ideal customers.

This means they’ll need to grips with the best colors, fonts, media types, shapes, and formatting so that your final web designs will resonate and emotionally engage with your visitors.

Here are just a few things UI designers are responsible for:

• Customer and design research
• Branding
• Graphic design (including animations)
• Establishing a customer storyline
• The responsiveness of your site (this includes mobile-friendliness)
• UI prototyping
• The interactivity of your site
• Communicating their vision with web developers and other necessary web designers.

Be sure to bear this all mind as you make a shortlist of potential candidates.

4. Have Interview Questions at the Ready

Once you know what you’re looking for; draft a few questions to ask your candidates.

For example:

• Can you explain your design process?
• Do you monitor the latest industry trends? If so, how?
• If a problem arises while you’re working, how do you handle it?
• What do you do if I don’t like your designs?

So, let’s circle back to the first question on the list (the one about the design process).

Unless you’re familiar with this industry, you won’t know what makes a ‘good’ response. Ideally, you want to hear that they’re happy to work alongside other relevant experts to formulate a strategy to suit your brand.

Now this ‘strategy’ should include (but is by no means limited to) analyzing your market as a whole, in addition to your main competitors. This info is essential for undertaking a comprehensive sitemap analysis and for understanding your products and services.

Final Thoughts

Although UI designers boast a plethora of skills, you can’t expect them to have an encyclopedic knowledge of everything. There’s a chance some of the jobs listed above will be split between UX and UI designers in addition to other digital marketing professionals.

However, it’s crucial you distinguish their primary responsibilities and understand what makes a good UI designer when it comes to hiring one. Hopefully, the above advice has helped you with that. All that’s left for you to do is hire the best possible UI designer for your project.