UX consulting: how to establish a profitable design process
When you’re uncertain about how to progress with your product design process or need in-depth expertise to complement your team, it’s time for UX consulting.
.png)
How does UX consulting work?
By hiring a UX consultant, you hire an expert dedicated to solving problems you might not have the ability, time or resources to solve.
UX consultants have a holistic view of the product design process. They’re seasoned seniors with hands-on experience and a strategic approach to UX issues.
Their job is to ensure that things:
- Are user-friendly
- Achieve your business goals
- Follow standards, best practices, and regulations
- Adhere to any specific requirement you may have, such as sustainability
UX consulting provides you with a comprehensive evaluation of your product at any stage of the product development cycle. Following the evaluation, the UX consultant will advise you on product strategy and facilitate workshops and training to equip your business with the best UX practices, processes, methods, and tools.
Business impact and ROI
The end goal of UX consulting is to optimize time and resources spent on design. This is achieved in the following ways.
1. Increased retention
According to the Baymard Institute, e-commerce usability improvements lead to an average sales increase of 35.26%. Similar growth is observed across all sectors.
The explanation is quite simple. A well-designed product will always respond to user needs and motivate them to engage with the product on deeper levels.
Personalization, using the right triggers, effectively communicating updates and simplifying navigation all add to more engaged sessions and a higher number of active users at any given time.
Increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%. (Reichheld and Schefter, 2020)
To increase your retention rate, UX consulting reveals which areas you can improve, and how.
2. Faster time-to-market
Rapid prototyping and continuous iterations guarantee that designs can be tested quickly and handed over to developers early.
A big part of this process is establishing anatomic design systems, so growth can be continuous.
Using a library of pre-designed, reusable components, businesses can streamline their design and development processes. [...] By cutting down on redundant work and reusing existing components, businesses can allocate resources more effectively and reduce overall project costs. (Yaschenko, 2024)
UX consulting improves your workflows and processes, so you can successfully accelerate your time-to-market with a minimal budget.
3. Reduced development costs
Your UX consultant will help your designers and researchers identify risks and usability early, and fix them before handover.
By building up effective research processes (using methods like user interviews or data science techniques) and internal feedback loops, designs will be validated before, not after development.
You save on maintenance costs, pricey fixes and updates.
4. Competitive advantage
Companies prioritizing strategic design have measurable growth, higher margins, and continuously outperform competitors in the stock market.
To put it in numbers, a study by McKinsey & Company identified 32% higher revenue growth and 56% higher TRS growth for companies using user-centric, analytically informed designs.
Westcott et al tracked design-first publicly held companies over a 10 year period, and analyzed the impact of their investments in design and innovation on stock value over time. The outcome for US companies indicates a stock performance advantage of 228% over competitors.
User experience consulting shows you how to use UX for your strategic advantage.
The UX consulting process
Whether you’re refining workflows, enhancing cross-team communication, or developing user-centric products, UX consulting provides the tools and knowledge to make UX an integral part of your strategy. Here’s how.
1. Discovery
UX consultants start by learning about your company, your struggles, needs and goals. We’re talking about an expert here, so this is a quick process. With the right assistance, they can be onboard within days.
2. Evaluation
With a detailed breakdown of UX issues, behavior analysis, and design recommendations, a UX consultant can help you prioritize the changes that will have the greatest impact on user experience and business outcomes.
In just a few days, the consultant can provide a clear, structured evaluation of your product’s usability, backed by industry best practices and real-world experience.
These actionable insights can help you reduce rework, improve accessibility, and refine your design for maximum usability.
But the process doesn’t stop here.
3. Workshop
This is an opportunity for departments to come together, supported by expert guidance, and learn how to solve problems faster, identify new business opportunities, and create exceptional user experiences.
These highly customized UX workshops equip key stakeholders and product teams with the right tools and methods to boost your company’s UX maturity.
Don’t picture a lecture: these workshops invite participants to think together and share their expertise.
The goal is to learn how to collaborate and make decisions based on facts and best practices.
4. Training
Workshops are often accompanied by personalized, interactive UX training designed for all experience levels. A UX consultant-led training covers essential UX design and research methods, giving your team practical skills they can apply immediately.
From design thinking and prototyping to conducting interviews and usability tests, they can tailor the content to your business needs to improve internal processes, and maximize your ROI.
Case study: UX consulting in practice
We held a 1-week UX consulting session focused on training for Syskit, a software development company creating enterprise governance and monitoring solutions for Microsoft 365.
They needed UX consulting for:
- Improving research planning
- Understanding the data
- Getting expert evaluation of their processes
- Learning to build a strong design system
- Having more effective design feedback sessions
Following an intro call, our consultants prepared activities and slides in a single business week, and were ready to fly to location.
They prioritized the following topics, complete with hands-on practice:
- Product discovery and agile process
- Research methods
- UI principles and tools
The team learned how to:
- Write impactful interview scripts and conduct interviews following general good practices guidelines.
- Build user journeys to better understand their user's problems.
- Create effective personas that represent their actual customer base.
- Build an agile roadmap that involves research discovery and UX design cycles.
- Set up a design system that can help a better dev-designer collaboration, while being fully proof to changes.
- Measure and plan the success of their UX work using the Google Heart Framework.
How to select the right UX consultancy?
If you know you need consulting, you also know that you’re having an issue. You just need to find a UX consultant or two that can help you get unstuck.
Option A. Hire a generalist
User experience consultants know UX/UI design and research processes inside and out, and can give you holistic solutions.
Expertise:
- UX strategy and product design alignment
- Information architecture and usability principles
- Interaction design and behavioral psychology
- Prototyping and iterative testing
- Accessibility, inclusive design, and design systems
What they do:
- Align your UX strategy with your product design goals, ensuring business-driven improvements like conversion optimization, retention, and engagement.
- Show you how to structure information architecture and apply usability, interaction design, and behavioral psychology principles to enhance user experiences.
- Teach you how to create low- and high-fidelity prototypes and interactive wireframes, supporting rapid iteration and usability testing to validate ideas quickly and effectively. They use tools like Figma, Axure, Framer, Spline 3D, and Webflow.
- Assist you in developing design systems and reusable UI components, with a strong focus on accessibility (e.g., WCAG compliance) and inclusive design.
Option B. Hire a specialist
When you’re facing hyper-specific problems, you may want to work with a consultant who can dive deep into your issue, such as a UI design consultant or a UX research consultant.
UI Design Consultant
Expertise:
- Visual design principles and aesthetics
- Typography, color theory, and branding integration
- UI design for different devices and platforms (web, mobile, enterprise apps)
- Design consistency and scalable design systems
- Accessibility and UI usability best practices
What they do:
- Help designing intuitive, visually appealing interfaces
- Support the creation of scalable and consistent UI systems
- Ensuring UI aligns with brand identity and user needs
- Enhancing usability and reducing cognitive load through visual hierarchy
- Optimizing UI for performance and responsiveness
UX Research Consultant
Expertise:
- Qualitative and quantitative research methods
- User interviews, surveys, and usability testing
- Data-driven decision-making and behavioral analysis
- Competitive analysis and benchmarking
- Human factors, psychology, and cognitive biases
What they do:
- Guiding in-depth user research to inform design decisions
- Identifying pain points, needs, and behavioral patterns
- Validating design concepts through research-backed insights
- Supporting teams in prioritizing UX improvements
- Creating UX research reports with actionable insights
Making the decision
We have collected the 5 best design and innovation consulting firms to work with. Once you found a trustworthy UX consulting company with good reviews and references, ask about their UX consulting services.
Here’s how to check if your selected UX consultancy is the real deal:
- Ask how they will prepare your company for long-term success. After the consultancy, your next steps should be crystal clear. Will they provide you with guidelines or a roadmap?
- Ask how you’ll be able to measure success. For every recommendation, there should be reliable metrics to keep track of progress.
- Ask how they customize their advice. Tailor-made solutions are the best way to make sure recommendations are feasible. Do your best to provide the UX consultant with the information they need; in return, you should expect specific and realistic advice.
Additionally, you can request testimonials and demo materials.
When you arrive at a call well-prepared with questions and a willingness to share your issues, the sales representatives can help you find the best fit, or directly connect you with their experts. This part is free!
What’s the difference between UX consulting, UX design, and UX research?
Quite simply put, the level of involvement.
UX designers and researchers can work in-house or as contractors from an agency. They integrate to your team and typically work full-time on your projects, handling hands-on tasks day to day.
On the other hand, UX consultants are hired for short periods to give strategic solutions for critical issues. They won’t create designs or facilitate usability testing.
Consequently, UX consultancy can be a cheaper option in critical periods when you need a quick but impactful change. They can check in periodically, but the goal is to raise your company’s UX maturity so you can become self-reliant in design, whether you have in-house designers, contractors, or developers wearing a designer hat.
Need UX consulting services?
If you would like to discover usability issues, learn how to handle them, and improve your product's performance, drop us a line or jump straight on a demo call with us. Our experts will find a solution fit to your budget and needs.
Credits
This blog post was written by Dr. Johanna Székelyhidi, marketing manager
Fact-checking by Dan Damsa, UX researcher
Additional insight by Mária Ilona Horváth, UX researcher
