How to Hire a UX Designer

Everyone thinks UX means "make the app look nice."

It doesn't. That's UI. UX is the part nobody sees: why the screens are in that order, why the form has three fields instead of seven, why people actually finish the thing instead of rage-quitting halfway.

So before you hire a UX designer, get clear on what you're buying. I match clients with designers for a living, and the single most common mismatch I see isn't skill. It's role. People hire deep researchers when they needed a pixel person, or a visual designer when they needed someone to fix a broken flow.

What a UX designer actually does (and how that differs from product and UI)

A UX designer owns the experience of using the thing.

That means: talking to users, mapping how they move through your product, finding where they get stuck, deciding what goes on which screen and in what order. Flows, wireframes, information architecture, usability testing. The structure.

A UI designer makes it look good and feel right. Colour, type, spacing, motion, the visual system. The surface.

A product designer does both, plus carries the business goal. They'll research, structure, design the screens, and care whether the feature actually moves a number. In a small team, the product designer is often all three roles wearing one hat.

So "UX vs product designer" isn't a trick question. UX goes deep on the user. Product goes wide and ships the whole thing. Pick based on the gap you have.

Hire for the work you need done, not the title on the CV.

When you specifically need UX (vs product or visual)

You need a UX designer when the problem is behaviour, not looks.

• People sign up and never come back, and you don't know where they drop.
• Your onboarding has too many steps and you can't tell which ones to cut.
• Support keeps answering the same "how do I…" question.
• You're adding a complex feature and need someone to map the flow before anyone touches Figma.
• You have analytics screaming that a funnel is broken but no idea why.

If instead your product works fine but looks dated, that's visual or UI. If you need someone to own a whole feature end to end and answer to the roadmap, that's product. Naming the gap correctly saves you the most expensive thing there is: a hire that does good work on the wrong problem.

Where to find good UX designers

The good ones are rarely on the first page of a freelance marketplace.

Strong UX designers get found through referrals, through the communities where they share teardowns and process, and through people who've worked with them and will vouch. Cold marketplaces are full of generalists who'll happily relabel themselves "UX" because that's what you typed in the search box.

If you have the network and the time to vet, use it. If you don't, that's the gap I fill. Design Broker keeps a bench of vetted senior designers and matches you with the right one for your specific problem, so you start in days, not weeks, with someone who's already been pressure-tested on real work.

How to evaluate UX work — process over pixels

This is where most people get it wrong. They open a portfolio, see beautiful screens, and hire.

Beautiful screens tell you almost nothing about UX.

A focused Figma file beats a polished portfolio. What you want to see is thinking: what problem were they handed, what did they decide not to do, how did they test the idea, what actually changed because of the work. A real UX designer can walk you through a tradeoff in plain English — "we cut these two fields because testing showed they were the drop-off, conversion went up X percent."

If every case study is a flawless win with no constraints, no dead ends, and no numbers, you're looking at a marketing piece, not a designer who reasons.

The questions that reveal a real one

Ask these in the first call. The answers separate the people who do UX from the people who say UX.

1. "Walk me through a project where the research changed your original plan." Real ones have a story. Fakers describe a straight line.
2. "How do you decide what not to build?" Good UX is mostly subtraction. Listen for it.
3. "Tell me about a design you shipped that didn't work, and what you did next." No failures means no learning.
4. "How do you test a flow with no traffic yet?" Senior people have cheap, fast methods that don't need thousands of users.
5. "What would you need from me to get started?" The right answer is a real brief and access to users — not just a Figma invite.

What it costs

A good freelance UX designer runs roughly $50 to $150 an hour, or $5,000 to $15,000 for a focused project, depending on seniority and where they're based. Full-time senior UX in the US sits around $110,000 to $160,000 a year plus everything that comes with a headcount.

But the rate isn't where you lose money. You lose it by hiring someone cheap who makes the wrong thing look finished, then paying again to undo it. Senior costs more per hour and less per outcome. Almost always.

The shortcut

You can spend three weeks writing a brief, posting it, sifting fifty applicants, and guessing from portfolios. People do it constantly.

Or you tell me the problem, and I match you with the right designer — UX, product, or visual, whichever your problem actually needs — from a bench I've already vetted. That's the whole pitch. I don't do design. I match the right kind of design with your business problem, and you start in days, not weeks.