UX consulting: what it is and why it pays off

‍What is UX consulting

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UX consulting means bringing in a senior UX expert for a defined stretch of time to help you make better product decisions. Instead of handing you finished screens, a consultant looks at what you already have, shows where users get stuck, and helps your team decide what to do about it. 

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The easiest way to see the difference is by looking at different roles. A UX designer builds the product, a UX researcher studies the people using it, and a consultant steps back and asks whether you are building the right thing, in the right order. It can take the shape of an audit, a discovery workshop, a round of usability tests, or hands-on training for your team. What ties them together is the goal. Your team ends up more confident and less dependent on opinions, guesswork and long debates. 

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You can also think about the work behind UX consulting as a mindset. When Honda Trading Romania's Deputy Head of Commercial described working with us on the MotoPlus+ leasing service, he pointed to two things he valued, which summarize consulting.

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“I recommend UXP because they are a very reliable and trustworthy. I like that they do research before proposing new things and the fact that they are very flexible. On the other hand, I like the fact that they do not only follow the brief but provide consultancy. They are very professional and go the extra mile with updates and support until the project is live,” Mihai Sandu, Deputy Head of Commercial Honda Trading Romania.

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Why it’s worth it

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Good UX shows up in growth, in conversion and in the cost of getting things wrong. Three pieces of evidence tell that story.

• It’s linked to business growth. McKinsey followed 300 publicly listed companies over five years and scored each one on how well it practices design (the McKinsey Design Index). Companies in the top quartile grew revenue 32 percentage points faster, and shareholder returns 56 points faster, than their industry peers. One detail we like is that the gaps between the other three quartiles were marginal. Dabbling does not seem to pay off. Real commitment to user-centered work does. (even though it’s a correlation, and not a guarantee, it’s a strong one.)
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• It moves conversion. Baymard Institute tested checkout flows with real users across 272 test sessions and found more than 2,700 usability issues finding out that the average large e-commerce site could lift its conversion rate by about 35% through checkout design improvements alone.
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• It’s cheaper to fix problems early. A rule of thumb you will hear often in usability circles says that changing a design after development can cost up to 100 times more than making the same change before it. It’s rarely traced to a firm study, so treat the exact multiplier as directional. Anyone who has rewritten a finished feature knows the direction is right, though. It’s the thinking behind the roughly 100 usability tests a year on Carrefour's loyalty app: problems surface while they are still cheap to fix. (read our case study to find the five problems we fixed in the app and what changed afterwards)

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A step by step guide for UX consulting

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Every engagement is different, but most follow the same arc. Here is the version we use, with real examples.

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1. Understand the problem 

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Before anyone opens a design tool, we get to know your product, your users and your goals. That usually means stakeholder conversations, a UX audit, a look at how competitors do it, and some early user research. On Carrefour's loyalty app and self-scan journey, this was a two-week "understand the problem" phase, followed by two-week design sprints. This is also where discovery workshops come in. 

For MotoPlus+, Honda's new operational leasing service, a workshop on brand values shaped everything that came after, and the whole project, identity and website included, took three weeks.

2. Audit and research 

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Next comes the evidence. A UX audit scores your product against established usability criteria, so you can see where it’s strong and where it’s losing people. When we audited Agricover's CROP360, an app that uses satellite data to help farmers monitor crops and plan planting, we scored it across seven categories. Trust and credibility came out at 77 out of 100. Navigation and information architecture scored 24. That gap told us where to start: a new information architecture, a step-by-step onboarding (farmers were abandoning the complex sign-up) and an experience built around the agricultural map. 

Research can also be the starting point for something new. For Demetra, a credit app for farmers with limited mobile skills, an eight-week project combined discovery workshops, personas and customer journey mapping, then usability tests to confirm the result was easy to use. 

3. Prioritize and recommend

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Findings only help if you can act on them. A good consultant turns everything into a clear order of what to fix first, and why. Carrefour shows what focused changes can do. After we simplified the loyalty challenges, with a progress bar, game elements and an easier way to earn and redeem, traffic to that area grew fivefold within a month. A reorganized catalog, with clearer categories and two ways to browse, doubled catalog traffic within three months. 

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4. Run workshops and train the team

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This is the step that separates consulting from plain outsourcing. Workshops bring product, design, development and business people into the same room to decide together, based on evidence. On Agricover, workshops and work sessions aligned the team around one shared vision. Training then gives people the methods to carry on without us. 

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5. Validate and measure 

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Finally, check that the changes work: usability tests with real users before development, metrics after launch. For Agricover, we tested wireframes and an interactive prototype with farmers before any code was written. 

For Ghimi, Credimatic's buy-now-pay-later service, usability tests and comparisons with alternatives helped refine the design, and users rated it 4.9 out of 5 against an average of 3.9. 

At Carrefour, regular usability sessions and an annual comparative test keep the product moving in the right direction. The app now counts about 2.9 million active users and a 4.2 rating.

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Where training fits in

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A good consultant works to become less necessary, and that is why training is part of how we work. Our UX training for teams is built around the goals we hear most often. 

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If your team needs to move faster, we introduce our sprint design process, which condenses months of work into four days. If you want fresh ideas, we show how to approach a project from the start and turn user insight into creative, meaningful solutions. If silos are slowing you down, we help product, design, development and business people work toward one shared goal. And if you simply want more usable, more satisfying digital products, we share what we have learned from years of projects. 

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Prefer to start on your own? Our free UX Essential Training covers the fundamentals in 43 videos across six chapters: introduction to user experience, research, information architecture, design, usability testing and the value of UX.

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Let’s talk

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Every project presented here started the same way, with a team that had a clear business goal and a product that was not quite delivering on it. Carrefour wanted a loyalty program that people find easy to use, and its app now has about 2.9 million active users. Agricover wanted more farmers to get through sign-up and subscribe. Honda wanted a new leasing service live in weeks.

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If you are facing something similar, a conversation is the quickest way to find out how we can help. Tell us what isn’t working, and we’ll tell you where we would look first, whether that is an audit, a workshop, a round of usability tests or training for your team.

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