Think about a state of affairs through which your organization should quickly redesign its cellular app to incorporate AI options like picture recognition, customer support chatbots, and residential screens tailor-made to consumer preferences. Nevertheless, your finances is tight, and your in-house designer hasn’t labored with AI options. Coaching shall be costly and time-consuming, and can distract your designer from their core duties.

Given your timeline and restricted finances, you resolve to rent a contract designer who focuses on AI and has intensive expertise implementing the options you want. When the freelancer joins your crew, they apply learnings from earlier tasks and shortly ship a research-informed prototype. After a quick strategy of testing and iteration, the brand new options go dwell, and the mission concludes on schedule and below finances. This isn’t a dream—I’ve seen eventualities like this play out for 15 years as a contract UI/UX designer, throughout which I’ve partnered with various purchasers resembling Royal Financial institution of Canada, Xello, and Rocket Properties Actual Property. I’ve additionally been a part of a number of time-sensitive, cash-strapped tasks requiring specialised expertise and insights. It’s all the time inspiring and gratifying when my work positively influences my purchasers’ merchandise and their in-house designers.

As extra extremely expert employees flip to freelancing, enterprise leaders are seeing that productiveness and creativity improve once they work with impartial expertise. Let’s study three of the largest advantages that freelance designers can convey to your organization.

1. Entry to Rising and Specialised Expertise

Freelance designers are inclined to work on quite a few tasks and infrequently purchase new expertise to deal with their purchasers’ extremely particular design issues. Stewart Pressney, Toptal’s Design Matching Staff Lead, says that entry to specialised expertise is without doubt one of the principal advantages of hiring freelance designers. In accordance with Pressney, impartial specialists are particularly efficient when corporations convey them on for various phases of the design course of. “You possibly can have somebody who’s nice at ideating and arising with ideas move their concepts off to somebody who’s good at implementing and creating pixel-perfect designs,” he says.

Freelancers are additionally a wonderful alternative for exploring cutting-edge tendencies and know-how. As an illustration, you would possibly rent a freelance illustrator who focuses on 3D modeling and rendering to create pictures that make your digital content material extra compelling and simpler to grasp. Or you could possibly have interaction a freelance UX designer so as to add AR/VR options to your e-commerce app.

Think about generative AI brokers like OpenAI’s ChatGPT: These applied sciences have immense potential to remodel digital services for the higher, however in case you’re at a startup or small firm, you might battle to draw design expertise with AI expertise. In such instances, impartial expertise could be a terrific solution to fill the talents hole and reap the velocity, effectivity, and customization AI affords.

2. Elevated Innovation and Creativity

For corporations of any dimension, various views are important in discovering efficient options. As Toptal product designer Eric Müller Moreno says, outsiders have “extra freedom and openness to speak about harsh truths,” including that impartial specialists can uncover organizational inefficiencies that will have hindered earlier design efforts. Having consulted on product improvement and design technique for Common Music Group, Deloitte, and the United Nations, he has the uncommon perspective of an business veteran who has partnered with organizations of all sizes.

As an illustration, Moreno was employed by a subsidiary of a distinguished media model to refine the dwell beta of its robo-investment app for buying shares and ETFs. The app costs customers based mostly on the funding kits they select. When Moreno got here to the mission, there was an MVP and a small consumer neighborhood, however the display group was clumsy, and the app supplied restricted selections for investing. Most of all, it didn’t mirror the maturity and distinction of the guardian model.

In some methods, the answer was hidden in plain view. “What I made a decision to do was, actually, simply comply with the [parent company’s] model information,” Moreno says. “There was good work carried out. It was fairly concise … we simply wanted to raise it.”

To try this, the crew developed subscription-based funding kits. Customers may decide from a number of funding methods, unfold their investments throughout sectors and fund varieties, and resolve what proportion of their portfolio they needed allotted to every. The app’s algorithms then monitored and managed the portfolio, leveraging an AI agent to make sure diversification and safety in opposition to draw back dangers.

The mission started as a beauty intervention, however Moreno’s perception into the subscription fashions of SaaS merchandise outdoors the fintech sector elevated it to a brand new degree. His wide-ranging design experiences knowledgeable new options, together with thematic buying and selling choices, an funding dashboard, monetary objective setting, and an improved onboarding move. And, the choice to convey better transparency to the cost mannequin contributed to a 144% improve in income per consumer, a 275% improve in property below administration progress, and a 40% improve in general product progress.

3. Value Financial savings

One motive corporations would possibly hesitate to rent freelance designers is perceived value. At face worth, an impartial expertise’s hourly fee seems increased than an worker’s. However corporations hiring freelancers don’t need to pay for 401(ok) plans, well being and incapacity insurance coverage, parental and medical go away, inventory choices, or efficiency bonuses. Moreover, most freelance designers work remotely on a per-project foundation, that means corporations can theoretically additionally lower your expenses by utilizing smaller places of work and never paying underutilized full-time workers throughout lulls within the product improvement course of.

Companies also can rent impartial specialists to fill short-term roles which might be sometimes carried out by high-earning workers. For instance, Jake Kahana, a Toptal model designer, just lately partnered with an actual property company on an app design mission that wanted to be accomplished shortly. The company lacked the funds for a full-time inventive director, however Kahana gave the corporate the strategic management perspective it wanted at a fee that labored for its finances. Overseeing a crew of junior designers, he directed a fast-tracked effort to get the app up and working whereas constructing belief among the many company’s purchasers that the design imaginative and prescient was grounded in enterprise targets. Kahana entered the function with vetted experience and effectively delivered an answer the company wouldn’t have been capable of afford in any other case.

Select the Proper Freelance Designer for Your Subsequent Mission

Whether or not you want a graphic designer, UX researcher, or AI specialist, the advantages of hiring freelance designers are clear: Companies that achieve this are capable of leverage the nuanced expertise of design professionals who convey contemporary views to tasks—whereas retaining prices in verify. The designers, in the meantime, get to be extra intentional in forging their profession paths, having access to various and significant alternatives that may speed up their skilled progress. It’s a win-win scenario.

“As an impartial designer, you get alternatives to see totally different corporations, totally different organizations, and other ways of doing issues. You’re capable of be reactive in a method an in-house individual may not be. Professionally, I’ve had entry to tasks I by no means imagined I’d have had,” Moreno says, pointing to his current work on an AI-powered database for the United Nations. “Whenever you do one thing like that, it actually offers you a way of goal.”