Say goodbye to the UX agency next door - The definitive guide to nearshoring

If your company has a UX project, and it does not have (enough) specialized designers, it’s a no-brainer to go and hire an agency or consulting firm for that work. But where do you find that agency that’s best for you? Well maybe you should look around in places you wouldn’t normally do.

Outsourcing is a common practice in all industries. Why pay a lot to companies in your country, when you can get the same quality of work done by a professional on the other side of the world – and for way less? While this is true in most cases, it’s not so common in design, as quality and face-to-face talks which facilitates a mutual understanding is critical in the design phase. Obviously successful agencies in the US or the UK have lots of overseas clients, but in those cases, there is usually a branch office with an established staff locally.

In this article, we’d like to explore why it’s worth to invest in nearshoring. Nearshoring is a type of outsourcing, where you hire an agency that is not based in your country, but one that has a border with yours – or at least it’s in the same region. So, let’s say you have a company in Amsterdam or Brussels: for you, nearshoring would be to find an agency in Eastern Europe, Budapest or maybe Krakow for example.

Perhaps you have concerns about this, working with a company in a different country? Isn’t that just overcomplicating an already complicated process? Doesn’t that take more working hours? Doesn’t that just make it even more expensive? And also: how would they know what works for users in my country? Let’s address those fears and let us also show you the benefits of nearshoring.

You don’t have to be in the same room to do workshopping

We’re not going to lie: it is a bit more complicated, but that does not necessarily make it worse. The strange situation our world is in due to COVID-19, forces all of us to experiment with remote work. Millions of people are trying to work from home, having meetings and even participating in design workshops online. It turns out, it does have its setbacks, but it also introduces so many benefits that it evens out.

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