Why do UI/UX designers not help without charging?
I have taken a lot of help myself - from other engineers, hackers, etc. People here take it for granted that you can ask people to help you with their code and they will not ask for money. Hell, I have lawyer friends who help out for free.
Yet, that is missing from the whole UI/UX design community - we are a small startup and needed some design help. Yet, all the designers that I seek even a bit of help from, take it as a personal affront that I am not paying. Somehow the inability to pay has morphed to a feeling of unwillingness to pay. There seems to be a general defensiveness because (and I'm guessing here) that design was a second class citizen at some point in technology's evolution.
Am I doing something wrong by expecting help for free as a friendly gesture ? this is a genuine question and I'm truly flummoxed.
16 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 40.9 ms ] threadFirst, when you say UI/UX, that's a red flag to me that you don't understand the kind of design you need. There isn't a "UI/UX design community." They're two different specialties, with a handful of subspecialties in each. If you don't understand your problem, and you're asking a stranger for help, I can completely understand that stranger wanting to make sure you're prepared to be taught all the things you don't know so you can understand your actual problem, and that means they have to invest time in you, which means they want to be paid for that.
Second, I don't work for free. That typically means anything resembling facilitation or a deliverable: a wireframe, a color scheme, conducting research. I'll talk all day long, though, if you're exerting all the effort.
Third, I help people out a lot for free, but I also do it within very narrow guidelines. I see it as a professional obligation, to build a positive understanding of design, to grow the ultimate market for my services.
I help out companies, startups and non-profits mostly by doing pro bono design office hours. I'll do them casually, if someone is referred to me. I'll also do them formally twice a year, helping dozens of startups in a single day, through IxDA Austin and Austin Startup Week. Perhaps there are similar events in your area. Try checking with co-working spaces and startup incubators, for example.
I'll also give pretty much anyone an hour of time on the off chance it turns into an interesting bit of contract work. I'll roll the cost of that hour (or whatever) into the contract, if one happens. It rarely does, however, because, there are very few times where the design question you think you have is the design problem you actually have. I've had people walk out of meetings because I'm asking them questions they don't have answers to. They thought they had one "UI/UX" problem, and I helpfully point out all the other problems they have, and they just weren't prepared to hear that.
I'm guessing when you ask for help with your code, you're not expecting someone to develop an entire application for you, for free. There's a very narrow problem you need help with, and, as engineers both, you and the person you ask can speak at the same level and come to a solution in short order.
It's not typically so with design.
You might "just" want to know what the "best" color for a button should be, or get help with color palette for an entire page so it "pops" more.
If I give you a color for your button, you'll walk away happy, sure, and think I'm swell. And then you'll implement it and your conversion rates will drop 30%, because statistically, you probably don't get enough traffic to know for sure for months. Do you know that, or will you panic? Is it the button color's fault? Is it an anomaly? Am I a bad designer? Are all designers frauds and hacks? I made you happy in the moment but have zero control of your opinion of me and of the situation afterwards.
The best thing for you would be for me to sit down with you and go over the entire page, maybe even all of the marketing for your entire product, to understand where this page fits in. Maybe you don't need a different color button, but a different placement. Or different copy. Or different images. Or a different campaign. Or a different product.
I don't know.
And if you're asking me about a button color, there's a better than even chance you don't know, either.
What I do know is, I'm not helping either of us by giving you a color instead of trying to understand your problem. And the only way I can be sure that you're interested in actually solving a problem, is to see if you'll pay for it.
If I'm right, and you don't know what kind of design help you need, I'd be happy to get on S...
But I'm generally curious on why you bristle when I ask for design help - I think from your answer that you believe that I'm asking for an inordinate amount of help a.k.a a whole design for free. If that is indeed the case, then your answer is immediately very helpful because it helps me finetune my request for help !
I have another question for you - as developers, we are pretty comfortable with people asking us to look over code and share opinion. In a lot of ways Dribble is just that. Is it impolite to show someone an existing, badly designed MVP and ask for some open ended design help - whether it be in colors, typography or layout ?
Or do you fundamentally believe this cannot be done without engaging in a contractual discussion.
I'm a developer and I have lots of designer friends. They are always very helpful with "small" tasks. However, what a developer thinks is a small item equivalent to looking over code may be actually substantial for a designer. Sometimes it's hard to tell and you may come off as rude asking for substantial work to be done for free.
I'm guessing you're reading into my statement, "I'm guessing when you ask for help with your code, you're not expecting someone to develop an entire application for you, for free." I'm not suggesting you are personally asking for an entire design for free (although you would not be the first if you were).
Rather, I'm saying that, if you don't understand your design problem well enough to ask a narrow-enough question of the right sort of designer (as you might with an engineer about a technical issue), then the person you're asking has to understand -- and potentially educate you about -- a much larger portion of your project. That sort of time investment only comes with payment.
I was a developer once, a long time ago, and I don't recall ever asking strangers or even friends to review my code. At least, not successfully. Are there actually places you can go and have random programmers look at your code? How do they run it? How do they build it? How do they understand your business logic? How are they able to duplicate your production environments? I feel as if your counterexample is a straw man. Code reviews amongst other people on your production team is not the same thing at all.
Dribbble is not a place for critique. It is a place for praise, specifically, between visual designers and artists. Only some of that overlaps with UI. Most people don't post in-progress work there, and Dribbble is not designed to facilitate critique of in-progress work when they do. So, that's not a great example.
Also, it's rare to actually be seeking "open-ended design help." If you have an MVP already, then you're already talking with a designer too late. There is a limited amount of change you will be willing to tolerate to your MVP, in very particular places, dealt with in very particular ways. It's the button color example from my first post again. Your MVP might not need a button color change. You might need to throw your whole MVP away. You are probably not prepared to do that.
I have talked with perhaps a hundred different startups through office hours in the past three years or so. Most startups want a pat on the head. They're not prepared to make any design-related changes at all, not to colors, not to copy, not to anything. Some startups are prepared to make superficial, cosmetic changes, but most designers aren't interested in helping you put lipstick on a pig. Designers do that all day long as their day job; they want a bigger impact if they're doing it for fun. Nearly no startups are interested in understanding how to figure out the real design problems in their product and how to solve them; that is, how to find product-market fit, and are willing to throw away all their existing work if necessary to do so. I could probably count those startups on one hand.
I have absolutely had people get up and walk out mid-sentence when I pointed out irredeemable problems with their idea, MVP, or launched application. That is not the kind of feedback most people are willing to hear "for free."
And if you are prepared to throw your MVP away, then you're stuck, because if you ask anything else of the designer at that point, that's real work, and they're not going to do that for free.
I think good free help can be obtained if you can ask a narrow-enough question of the right sort of designer, absolutely.
In my experience, though, that question is hardly ever the right question you should be asking.
From all your answer(s), I get the feeling that UI/UX designers tend not to spend time for free because of one of three reasons:
1. a quick design help cannot be done and the alternative is too much effort to be justified
2. if you have an MVP before you are taking design help - its already too late
3. You really dont want design help - you want platitudes
Let's say, for argument's sake, that I dont fall in any of these categories - built a MVP, took it to market, started generating revenue already. But I think I understand design (but am unskilled at it) and I can take a complete trashing of my current work. However, for certain startup-survival reasons, I need to make something incrementally better (both UI and UX). It's not the promised land, but just one teeny step towards it.
How can I frame my request for help to not piss you off, not waste too much of your time and still not kill my startup ?
It's also a good example of why quick design help is hard, because there is no way for anyone but you to know what would be incrementally better or not for your users. All an outside designer can do is suggest things that might be interesting to test. You still have to try them and measure the change over time. A given designer has no specific knowledge about your market, and something can be well-designed in general but still have a lot of potential for market optimization.
( In fact, a colleague runs a service that is just that: he'll try something new for you, every month. https://draft.nu/revise/ )
Since only you have the data on your MVP, start there. Put together your customer lists. Make sure you understand their demographics and their usage patterns and why they purchased and what they were considering instead. Make sure you have ways to contact them for research interviews and if it's possible to go on-site to see them use your product live. Document how your competitors present and discuss their products.
Then, pick something. One small thing. A landing page. A particular form. A headline. Copy for a Google Adwords ad. Something you can measure your current performance on, and measure a change to afterwards. If you're not high-volume, this might be harder to find than you think, but go through the exercise of figuring out what you can collect enough data on now, and what can wait to change until you can measure it later (or what you don't care about measuring).
Then, you can take that one thing to a designer and say, "I'm looking to experiment with different changes to <X>. What are some things you think might be interesting to try? Anything goes."
You're not asking them to do any work. You're not asking them to stake their reputation on the line. Your language ("experiment," "different changes (plural)," "interesting," "try," "anything goes") all says you're willing to respect their time and level of engagement and also that you're prepared to handle their advice properly, that you're not looking for a silver bullet, you're looking for all of the lead bullets.
Say you ask for help with a landing page. A designer might suggest some copy or visual design tweaks for clarity (specific changes), but also suggest you test different headlines (without providing any), and also changing your format from short form to long form or vice versa (definitely without providing any content to you, but maybe they would be interested enough to sketch out some varied layouts). These are all great ideas. You should read up on A/B testing and test all of them in isolation, and also all together. You should test big dramatic changes even more frequently than you test small copy changes, because you don't want to be stuck looking for a local maximum. A UX person might also suggest ways to find out other things to test, research questions to ask, and suggest books or other resources so you can collect that data well.
A startup that came to office hours that well-prepared would basically almost not need design help at all.
If you don't have the money to afford quality help, and instead you have to beg, then you're not where you think you are yet.
It's just supply vs demand. UI/UX design is in very high demand. Every startup and entrepreneur wants a logo, graphic design or a website. Why waste time helping someone out for free when you can charge for it?
I don't think it's useful to pretend that all us engineers are completely altruistic. Some are, sure...but a lot of us are self-interested "rational actors".
When I help another engineer, or when they help me, there's sort of an implied quid-pro-quo. If you helped me out, I'm definitely going to take your call when you need me, etc. I'll gladly help you out without even knowing if I'll ever need your advice, because, as people who do the same work, it's very likely that you'll be useful to me in the future.
If a designer, or a CEO, or an attorney approached me and asked for advice, would I be so open and available? Probably not. When you're reaching out to someone of a completely different skill-set, it might be harder for that person to conceptualize how it would be worth their time to help you.
Back to your situation: When you reach out to a designer, ask yourself: Am I at-all useful to this person? Will they ever need my advice? If not, you're going to need to work extra hard off-the-bat to make sure they understand your value (and why helping you will pay dividends).
I do some UI/UX work for free, but only for a hobbyist community of musicians I am a part of since it is a community centered around a love of particular content. I also offer some help for free on IRC on solving simple problems. Otherwise, I charge for my services since my time is valuable.