UX consulting is something that you may have heard of before, or perhaps you’ve come across terms like “UX consultant” or “UI/UX designer”. There are various areas of consultancies, from fashion consulting to financial consulting, aimed at giving expert advice in order to help businesses. UX consulting does the same but so much more.
There are numerous UX consulting firms all over Asia, especially in Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia, led by teams of UX consultants. The supply of expertise and skills is available, and it’s a great opportunity to jump on the bandwagon early to get a headstart on your competitors through UX consulting for your business.
What is UX Consulting?
UX consulting is more than just advice-giving, a UX consultant thoroughly investigates the aspects of your product/service that your users interact with. And it isn’t limited to just the design and interface but UX consultants also examine the layout, the flow and the content.
UX isn’t just about how it looks but more importantly, how it works. UX consultants can also bring about a holistic view of your product/service, viewing your business as a whole, from business model, value propositions, target users and persona, and especially the user flow, and all the various user interface, as well as content.
You don’t necessarily need to have a problem with your product/service before engaging UX consultants, and there are various aspects of UX consulting that can be of help to your business. Let’s take a look at the different services and benefits of UX consulting:
UX Consulting Services
1. UI/UX Audit
Conducting a UI/UX audit on your product/service can be likened to getting a health check. UX consultants can do a health-check on your products/services by inspecting in detail for usability issues and identifying areas for improvement.
UX consultants have in-depth knowledge and industry expertise which allows them to properly evaluate your website or application, checking that it adheres to design and usability best practices and principles.
A UI/UX audit is especially beneficial if you and your business are trying to strategize your user experience, furthermore, an independent expert provides a vital and relevant perspective.
The UI/UX audit includes a heuristics evaluation in which UX consultants use various diagnostic tools to review the metrics and key usability factors that affect conversion. UX consultants will review every aspect, looking at the navigation, how information is organized and presented, and especially looking into whether users can complete the key tasks easily.
Aside from evaluating how usable your product is, UX consultants can provide suitable recommendations in improving usability. Furthermore, there is an added option to obtain further and deeper insights by conducting usability testing with your real users. The UX consultants can then analyze the insights and suggest various improvements that suit your business needs and constraints.
2. Corporate Innovation Consultation
UX consultants are knowledgeable in design thinking methodologies and their skillset and expertise are especially handy for businesses looking to leverage emerging technologies to innovate and elevate their business.
It’s more important than ever to innovate and be a leader in the industry. Unfortunately, those who fail to do so are left behind and become irrelevant in the business landscape.
For corporate innovation consultation, UX consultants can help your business in adopting new technologies to accelerate the rate of innovation in order to not only keep up with your competitors but to lead the pack. The risk of innovation is also minimized due to the consultant’s expertise and methodologies, aiding your business in achieving a faster product-market fit in a more cost-effective manner.
Oftentimes, companies spend a lot of time going through ideas, and it can end up being a waste of time and money, but this risk is minimized by having a consultant onboard. In addition, UX consultants can help your team by implementing user research techniques and user testing systems, resulting in a maximized rate of learning for your team.
3. UX Training & Agile UX Coaching
In addition to implementing user research techniques and user testing systems to help your team, UX consultants can also conduct UX training.
The UX training course delves into the stages of the product design process, discovery, design & evaluation. Looking at various UX research methods and planning, user experience basics, data analysis, visual design, and prototyping. Your team will also emerge from the UX training with the knowledge of user-centred design and UX tools and techniques that they can apply for all the projects.
Training up your team in UX will help them be more effective in their work, and not to mention, it will also save your business time and money in the long-run. Furthermore, UX consultants can adapt and train your team according to your team and business needs.
Agile is very popular with many businesses and UX consultants can help in raising the value of lean and agile ways of working. This is done by training your team to maximize their capabilities in running faster design research & design iterations, as well as an increase in the team’s overall productivity.
4. Design Thinking Workshop
Aside from UX training, UX consultants can also hold design thinking workshops for your business. Design thinking is a process of designing solutions with your customers in mind.
The most successful and innovative businesses are customer-focused. By understanding your customers’ thoughts, pain points, motivations, and actions, you can design even better products, services and experiences for your customers with a higher success rate.
Design thinking workshops include empathy-building activities whereby the UX consultant and your team will go through customer journey mapping, opportunity mapping, and the concepts of ethnographic research in understanding your customers’ needs and to identify opportunities.
The workshop will also train your team in taking customer insights and turning them into suitable prototypes, going into the concept development and creation, as well as implementation. Your team will be trained in using frameworks and toolkits that they can integrate easily into projects.
5. Business Model Validation & New Product Conceptualization
Business model validation is incrementally helpful in reducing uncertainty in your business models and value propositions. This is especially crucial for new businesses, to only invest in what will work and to pivot and find new ideas for things that don’t work.
UX consultants come in and validate your business model as a research study, by identifying your business ideas as assumptions and breaking it down into business model hypotheses. These key business model hypotheses and value propositions are then ranked according to risk to ensure that the riskiest assumptions are prioritized and tested accordingly.
The UX consultants will conduct research sessions and test with your target audience, saving you and your business a lot of time and resources early on instead of going with risky and costly assumptions. The tests are customized and designed to test whether the assumptions are valid, with real evidence and insights from your customers.
Based on the findings, the consultants will be there throughout the iteration in fine-tuning your product/service, ensuring there is value being delivered to your customers and crafting a successful business model and product-market fit.
6. On-Demand UX Consultation & Research
Your business may have your own in-house UX design team or research team but sometimes, there’s just too much going on during the research-heavy stages of the development process and an extra hand or two is incredibly helpful.
This is where UX consultants come in, they are able to step in and assist your team at any stage of the development process. Furthermore, the expert background of UX consultants enables them to be flexible in their role and to be tailored specifically to your business needs.
Who are UX Consultants?
UX consultants stem from various different backgrounds and disciplines, oftentimes they have an educational background in user interface design, human-computer interaction (HCI), or perhaps even a background in development or business.
UX consultants are knowledgeable in various user research methods such as information architecture testing, business modeling, user testing, UX design, as well as strategy and planning.
Netizen Experience is an award-winning UX research & strategy consulting firm in Asia. We have provided expertise to various enterprises in Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam & the Philippines.
Drop us a message or speak to our human-friendly UX consultants!
