Choosing a design agency
How to choose, brief and work with a design agency for B2B software. Written for founders and CTOs of B2B software companies.
8 Entries
01
Design agency, freelancer or in-house designer?
An in-house designer suits a product with steady design work and someone to lead design.
02
When does a dedicated design team make sense?
A dedicated external design team makes sense when design work runs for months, several modules develop in parallel and there is no design lead.
03
What should a B2B software design portfolio show?
Landing pages and mobile concepts show little about designing an ERP module. Under NDA, anonymised examples and a written problem description can stand in.
04
How to evaluate a design agency’s domain knowledge
Portfolio images show visual skill. A conversation about one of your workflows shows what the agency knows about your data and users.
05
How to brief a design agency for B2B software
A useful brief describes the product, its users and the decision the design work should support.
06
What to prepare before a design engagement
Most items take an afternoon to collect: access, material and decisions that would otherwise slow the first weeks.
07
Execution constraints set the frame for design
Designs that ignore frontend capacity, font licences or deadlines get simplified during implementation.
08
Working with your development team
Handoff works best as a series of reviews during the project, with developers seeing the design early enough to question it.