STARTUP ADVICE: How to reduce your design teams outgoing costs
Unless you work for a unicorn company like Monzo or Revolut, with hundreds of thousands in funding, startups usually have to be increasingly careful how they budget their fundraising to ensure a longer runway between investment rounds. New design tools are emerging month-month, and with them comes an increasing price tag. In this article I’ll outline which design tools you can adopt into your workflow to stay productive, whilst using your design team budget effectively.
It used to be the case that product designers would simply need a Sketch licenc and perhaps a subscription to Adobe CC. However now as role definitions grow, product designers are expected to conduct interviews, form personas, journey map, user test, and prototype, alongside thier usual UX & UI commitments. This means their current toolkit is no longer appropriate and more efficient tools are emerging all the time.
So here are some alternative design software to ensure you can keep costs down.
Use Figma, not Sketch & Abstract
Figma is the FREE tool to use for designing and teamwork. It’s growing increasingly popular for smaller teams with minimal budgets, and is almost identical to Sketch, just packed with more features. Not only does it serve as an effective and cheaper alternative to Sketch, but it also steps on the toes of version control application, Abstract. With Figma, several people can be working simultaneously on the same file and visualise the changes that are made in real time. For a team of 3 designers using Figma, and by removing the need to use Sketch, and Abstract this could bring you a total saving per month of $327.
Sketch & Abstract — $651 per year
Figma — FREE
Use QuickTest, not UsabilityHub
Paired with a slick UX, Quicktest is an iOS app to aid designers when conducting research. The app allows design teams to test multiple UI variations, fine tune visual assets, marketing copy and branding, in person using guerrilla methods, or remotely by generateing a unique URL to share with their team or participants.
UsabilityHub brings an additional two features to QuickTest, however it’s only available on Web, and doesn’t include a native app for guerrilla testing. One key feature for UsabilityHub is their ability to source participants for your tests. This is key when defining demographics to test with. It’s worth mentioning participant sourcing adds an additional $50 per participant.
QuickTest have also created a growing Slack community of designers, product managers and founders, all sharing their A/B tests online for anyone to participate in and provide their opinion.
QuickTest are currently in BETA, and are offering merchandise 👕 for every new premium user. You can download QuickTest here.
For a team of 3 designers using QuickTest, and by removing the need to use UsabilityHub this could bring you a total saving per month of $300.
UsabilityHub— $300 per month
QuickTest — £9.99 per month for your whole team
Principle, not Adobe CC/After Effects
Principle uses a familiar interface reducing the learning curve to almost nothing, and is made specifically for app micro animations. After effects, as a part of the Adobe CC bundle can be great if you know what all the functions do. After Effects was originally created to support video editing and has been used to create many popular BBC cartoons. A far cry from creating a hover effect on a button.
For a team of 3 designers using Principle, and by removing the need to use Adobe CC this could bring you a total saving per year of £1500.
Adobe CC — £1800 per year
Principle — £300 per year
So how much would this save your team?
So there you have it, by making three simple changes to your design toolkit, for a team of three, you could bring your yearly cost from ~£6000 to just £310.
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