UXReactor

I’m the chief product officer at a cybersecurity company.

We were looking to build a new platform and move our user interface to HTML5 technology. We didn’t have any in-house UX, visual design, or user research expertise on staff, so we looked to UXReactor for help.

UXReactor helped us set up new UI standards for the new product. For the actual design, their UX designers worked within our scrum teams and worked directly with the engineering team. The third service they provided was user research, wherein they developed a structured research process. They worked in HTML5 AngularJS.

We started with three members from their team, which expanded over time. Now, we work with six people from their team, comprised of a UI designer, visual designer, and a user researcher. The user researcher our main point of contact as well as a project manager.

The business model they provided made sense since we’re very small. To hire a UX designer, a visual designer, and a user researcher would have been very cost absorbent. UXReactor was able to provide a team of three at the cost of one full-time employee.

We’ve spent $225,000.

We began working together in July 2016, and our work is ongoing.

We do a lot of iterative testing with internal stakeholders, existing customers, and also non-users; the feedback has always been positive. The UI is intuitive and easy to understand.

Their communication is very good. The team is very good at meeting their deadlines. We use Microsoft Teams, Google Docs, and Pivotal Tracker to facilitate collaboration.

Their biggest strength is that they train their personnel very well to iterate. They come with multiple options and take feedback very well, and are always ready to iterate quickly.

Their biggest challenge is their level of experience and retaining their experienced staff.

I wouldn’t use them if all you’re trying to do is revamp your web page; that would be an under-use of their skills. If you feel really strongly about UX and you have a strategic project, that would be an excellent fit for them. They’ll do a lot of research and iterate constantly.

I’m head of solutions management for a telecommunications company. We create software products that run telecommunication networks and business management systems for telecommunications companies or enterprises with larger networks. We’re a software incubation group.

We were well into a software project and realized that we didn’t have a design for customer interaction. That portion of the project was also unfunded, so we needed to quickly bring in a designer to handle the intuitive presentation of a tremendous amount of data. It was essential for users to navigate through the software seamlessly.

They designed the wireframes and screen that displayed how a user would navigate through the software. It was a collaborative relationship because they passed the designs for our team to develop in Java after they were complete. Once we determined together how a user might accomplish a certain task, they moved onto the visual presentation side of the work. We had a number of very specific design problems, and they helped us determine how to solve them.

We worked with between 10–15, which includes designers, data visualization specialists, the owner, and a project manager.

From our network, we knew the owner of the company. This was helpful because we were able to approach him without much of a solidified idea of what we needed. Our existing familiarity with each other helped us work together to locate the right resources and scope of the project. After he provided us with advice, he offered to submit a bid for the project with his company.

For the first project, we budgeted $1.3 million.

We started working together in June 2019. At this point, we’ve renewed our contract for another project.

Their process and methodology were impeccable. They had the ability to guide us and be effective consultants. Despite us not knowing what we wanted, they helped us make important decisions on design problems. They helped us solve big problems.

There was some back-and-forth, but it was necessary for our company to experience it. Their team helped us make decisions and confront the necessary issues. They did an outstanding job of keeping us on track and updating us on progress. We communicated mostly through email and phone calls.

Their ability to question our processes to help us expose the company to a new way of problem-solving was important. The methodology we were using for this project was very different from our typical operations. Their ability to open our eyes to new methodologies and perspectives has a profoundly positive impact on our team.

The majority of their design team is in a different time zone. Things may have been a little more smoothly if we determined a time zone for all of our teams to follow consistently, rather than switching back and forth.

I’d invite companies to think about their design problems in new ways with the team. That’s what they’re best at.

I’m the director of design and product innovation at Tekion Corp, a B2B software company. We also design and develop software solutions for automotive dealerships.

As a startup company, we were looking for a design firm that could help accelerate us by building us a design system that was user friendly and would reduce training cost.

UXReactor started with a comprehensive research report, wherein they explored the field of dealerships to understand user processes and workflows. They delivered the report, which contained insights about our customer, and then used their findings to build the entire system, from wireframes to experiences. In terms of design, we’d given them specific guidelines in some engagement areas, and in others, we were quite flexible. The process was collaborative, iterative, and feedback-driven.

We worked with over 10 members of the UXReactor team. We had several project managers, including at the senior level. We also worked with the CXO.

Our CEO and CFO had reached out to a couple of different firms, and they’d tried at least two of them, but a lot of them didn’t deliver the experiences we were looking for. It was also difficult to find someone who could deliver as quickly as we needed. UXReactor has a really strong process-driven approach to design, communication, and transparency, which we found superior to other firms.

The project took place from January 2017–January 2019.

One of the most important things we’d set forth was to ensure it would be really simple and easy to train our customers on the platform. That’s been a resounding success. There’s an ease of training based on their thought processes.

Their project management skills were excellent. UXReactor met our needs for day to day updates extraordinarily well. We had at least three different tracks running simultaneously at the peak of the engagement, and they were able to give daily updates with timelines for every single project both at a summary level and on a very detailed project level. If there were ever any changes to the plan, they were very clear and communicative.

Their processes are their strength, which allows for consistency.

There’s nothing that comes to mind.

Leveraging research is really important. There were a few areas where we could’ve talked to a few more end customers to understand their pain points better, and those were instances in which we had to go back and rebuild things. UXReactor isn’t just a design firm, they’re a research firm, so not leveraging that aspect of their work will be a detriment to the value you can drive.