Ask HN: How do you find a great UX person?
Hi, professional UX person here.<p>A lot of UX candidates are going to self-select out from this description, because you&#x27;re bringing them in too late in the process.  You&#x27;re assuming that the requirements that someone (who?) has come up with are remotely correct, and an experienced UX person knows that&#x27;s nearly never the case.  (Perhaps you have a well-validated stack of customer and market research completed!  But I&#x27;m going to assume that, like most product teams, you don&#x27;t.)<p>Industry studies have found that features and product ideas developed in isolation are wrong, 1&#x2F;3 to 1&#x2F;2 or more of the time, where &quot;wrong&quot; is defined as &quot;doesn&#x27;t move the needle in the way it was expected to.&quot;<p>An experienced UX person is going to want to come in before requirements, to help collect the requirements through understanding users and use cases, and to do the &quot;variety of design concepts&quot; at that stage, often even with active participation from dev, PM, and other stakeholders.  (You&#x27;ll see this called &quot;design studio&quot; or other types of participatory, facilitated design.)<p>Metrics and measurements are also best developed at that stage, and actively tested to make sure the concepts will affect them in the way everyone expects.<p>You may be having trouble because &quot;taking&quot; requirements is often something only done by production designers: people who make the final graphics for implementation.<p>You might have the best success by visiting your local design meetups and looking for a freelancer or consultant with at least several years of experience doing design research, user research, and facilitation, the more experience the better.  Hire them to vet and interview candidates; they&#x27;ll want to understand how your team works and what your expectations for the role are.<p>Listen to them if they suggest your expectations are misaligned with regards to an effective design process.