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It could be, if you do it right. As a former freelancer and now consultancy owner, I suggest you to: 1. Avoid cheap freelancers. 2. Always start with small ta

It could be, if you do it right. As a former freelancer and now consultancy owner, I suggest you to: 1. Avoid cheap freelancers. 2. Always start with small tasks to test a freelancer. Assume a freelancer is unreliable until proven otherwise by his actions. 3. Make a wireframe yourself, then hire a designer to design it, then hire a developer to develop it. To save money, you can skip the designer, but the end result will be ugly. You need to decide what you want to build and specify how it will look like BEFORE hiring someone to build it. 4. If you don't want to or don't know how to make a wireframe, consider hiring a good consultancy to do it with you. They're more likely to have this skill than freelancers. I believe essentially you need help building your MVP, and your options (freelancing, full-time employee, co-founder, or consultancy) are just different ways of getting that help, they don't matter as much as finding someone you can trust, and managing expectations, especially your expectations.

itronitron 8y ago
adding on to this, it is important when you draft the wireframe that you think through all possible paths that a user can take through the MVP and whether any application state is maintained between user actions. Those should be noted in the wireframe. Your primary objective in creating the wireframe is to answer all questions regarding the application state and user flow and also to remove any unnecessary complexity.
muzani 8y ago
In my experience, the expensive freelancers can be even worse than the cheap ones. They often take a well padded amount so they could outsource it to someone cheap.
- gammateam 8y ago
  Here is an anecdote that maybe others can relate to: We hired an expensive design firm that had done the work and designs of other companies in our sector. Those companies had decent UI and a good amount of users. The company spends a lot of time doing something like a vision quest to accomplish branding, and UI designs take a long time. The UI was nice to see come together, but it was clear their designer had no experience with this kind of product and target audience. The branding and logos and typefaces are top notch. It is all congruent with a story and has good rationale behind it. Now, the external development firm we work with also has designers in it. The work we do with them is billed at $60/hr when that designer is involved, so the designer is probably getting $40. In the scale of cheap vs expensive when it comes to designers, this is not considered cheap, but it is much less than the prior "enterprise design firm". Cheap would be the $5 talent in Pakistan on Fiverr. This designer is able to crank out UI designs in a day, we can review them and modify them midflight using collaborative tools, and I am much more satisfied. This isn't my first experience with this, but my thoughts are that design is hit or miss. It just comes down to creative vision, experience, or the series of templates the designer has. Doing a contest or getting proposals will get you a better distribution of possibilities, and the designer's process and pipeline is more important. The $5 Pakistani can also be good. You just need an efficient way to get design samples.
  - mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
    I take it you have a UX person on the team? Otherwise I feel bad for your company if you are using a UI designer in place of well thought out UX. No amount of pretty can fix a serious workflow issue.
    - gammateam 8y ago
      edit: Yes, we have UX.
  - dhimes 8y ago
    Here's another anecdote about using freelancers for this: When I wanted a logo for studyswami.com, I went to fiverr (or something similar) and asked several different designers for a logo. With all of these logos in hand, I brought them to a group of people who shared what they liked and didn't like about each one. After a bit I had a decent idea, and hired an expensive designer and gave her a clear idea of what I wanted. She then did a brilliant job, producing three or four outstanding logos. I think the logo I chose is one of the best out there anywhere. The problem with the expensive designers is that they are hampered by the limitations of creative brainstorming as much as anybody, yet is a big part of your cost. They usually give you a limited number of designs- like 3 or 4- to choose from, and you're 'stuck' in that circle of thinking. So if you can clarify what you want for cheap you'll better use the talent of the experts, IMHO.
    - ghaff 8y ago
      And the expensive designers are better skilled to make it part of a branding system, consider issues like scalability from logos to tradeshow backdrops, etc. But, yeah, in many cases they can spend a lot of time developing concepts that are an immediate "No" from your perspective. >hampered by the limitations of creative brainstorming as much as anybody That's as good a way of putting it as any. Maybe they're better at thinking "outside the box" than someone within the company or off the street. But that hasn't really been my experience working with branding and design firms--especially if you already have at least some idea of the direction you'd like to take things.
    - 8y ago

itronitron 8y ago

adding on to this, it is important when you draft the wireframe that you think through all possible paths that a user can take through the MVP and whether any application state is maintained between user actions. Those should be noted in the wireframe. Your primary objective in creating the wireframe is to answer all questions regarding the application state and user flow and also to remove any unnecessary complexity.

muzani 8y ago

In my experience, the expensive freelancers can be even worse than the cheap ones. They often take a well padded amount so they could outsource it to someone cheap.

gammateam 8y ago
Here is an anecdote that maybe others can relate to: We hired an expensive design firm that had done the work and designs of other companies in our sector. Those companies had decent UI and a good amount of users. The company spends a lot of time doing something like a vision quest to accomplish branding, and UI designs take a long time. The UI was nice to see come together, but it was clear their designer had no experience with this kind of product and target audience. The branding and logos and typefaces are top notch. It is all congruent with a story and has good rationale behind it. Now, the external development firm we work with also has designers in it. The work we do with them is billed at $60/hr when that designer is involved, so the designer is probably getting $40. In the scale of cheap vs expensive when it comes to designers, this is not considered cheap, but it is much less than the prior "enterprise design firm". Cheap would be the $5 talent in Pakistan on Fiverr. This designer is able to crank out UI designs in a day, we can review them and modify them midflight using collaborative tools, and I am much more satisfied. This isn't my first experience with this, but my thoughts are that design is hit or miss. It just comes down to creative vision, experience, or the series of templates the designer has. Doing a contest or getting proposals will get you a better distribution of possibilities, and the designer's process and pipeline is more important. The $5 Pakistani can also be good. You just need an efficient way to get design samples.
- mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
  I take it you have a UX person on the team? Otherwise I feel bad for your company if you are using a UI designer in place of well thought out UX. No amount of pretty can fix a serious workflow issue.
  - gammateam 8y ago
    edit: Yes, we have UX.
- dhimes 8y ago
  Here's another anecdote about using freelancers for this: When I wanted a logo for studyswami.com, I went to fiverr (or something similar) and asked several different designers for a logo. With all of these logos in hand, I brought them to a group of people who shared what they liked and didn't like about each one. After a bit I had a decent idea, and hired an expensive designer and gave her a clear idea of what I wanted. She then did a brilliant job, producing three or four outstanding logos. I think the logo I chose is one of the best out there anywhere. The problem with the expensive designers is that they are hampered by the limitations of creative brainstorming as much as anybody, yet is a big part of your cost. They usually give you a limited number of designs- like 3 or 4- to choose from, and you're 'stuck' in that circle of thinking. So if you can clarify what you want for cheap you'll better use the talent of the experts, IMHO.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    And the expensive designers are better skilled to make it part of a branding system, consider issues like scalability from logos to tradeshow backdrops, etc. But, yeah, in many cases they can spend a lot of time developing concepts that are an immediate "No" from your perspective. >hampered by the limitations of creative brainstorming as much as anybody That's as good a way of putting it as any. Maybe they're better at thinking "outside the box" than someone within the company or off the street. But that hasn't really been my experience working with branding and design firms--especially if you already have at least some idea of the direction you'd like to take things.
  - 8y ago