Ask HN: How and whom to hire – First designer?

1 points by sudheendrach 11 years ago | 2 comments

Hey everyone,

I run a B2B SaaS company (5 month old), so far I've been doing the user research/UX stuff, while my school friend is helping out with visuals. So many product features getting shaped and I feel it's high time we hire a full-time designer. After talking to lot of people and reading articles online, I understood there are three types of designers - UX (user research, wire framing, story board, sitemap), UI (design the interface using Photoshop/Illustrator/Fireworks) and Visual/Graphic designers (logo, posters, branding etc.)

My question:

Should we get someone who'll own all the facets of the design? Where to find such desingers and what to test during the interviews?

Or either hire two designers one will be doing the UX part and the other will be designing the user interface?

What would you suggest and why?

Thanks in advance for sharing your knowledge!

davismwfl 11 years ago |

Frankly if you are smaller and working on a tighter budget, I'd get someone that can be a jack of all trades. Not saying that having an expert in each area wouldn't be awesome, but it doesn't come without its headaches. If you are small < ~10 people, having more than 1 designer is a bad idea in my experience. If you hire really good people you will wind up with delays while they either A) collaborate or B) battle over who is right. It is better in the early stages to move faster and have one vision on design that is done in collaboration with the other users.

So instead I say go with one good designer for now, you can always add more later, but remember, hire slow, fire fast.

If you are interested, I know of someone who is really good and amazing at collaborating with the team. As far as I know, he only works remote, but if you even want to talk to him about what to ask or look for, it may be worth your while. You can shoot me an email (in profile) if you have any interest.

matthewjames 11 years ago |

The nice thing about having someone unqiue to each area is they should "theoretically" be an expert in that area. Most of the time that really isnt the case and I suggest you search for some that is disciplined for the most part in all.

I would wholey reccommend skipping the Photoshop stage. Find someone who can design/mockup wholey with html and css. This will reduce overhead of having multiple people while speeding up your pipeline.

Hope this helps out a little!