SDR FAQ
Precode is UX design consultancy. We offer the following core services.
General
Dream clients
x
y
5-Day UX Sprint
Who do you help?
Who do you help? What result can you get them? Is there a specific timeframe? How do you get these results?
We help companies and funded startups to create better digital products, faster.
We do this with a framework we call the 5-Day UX Sprint. This is a 5-day process, fixed price and agreed start and end date.
We have a 2-hour preflight call the week before as a discovery session and to define the challenge and the expected outcome, and to set expectations.
Because we work in 5-Day sprints, we always start on a Monday and end on a Friday. Each day is split into three parts:
Morning standup with the client
Work/sprint
We record a “Show & Tell” which is a screen recording of us talking through what we did that day
Notes:
we do not have a standup on the Monday
We have a handover meeting at around 4pm on the Friday
Couple of things:
We have two sprint teams, of 2-3 people each. Each team will have a senior UX designer
Each sprint team will live and breath that project and that challenge for the entire week. No internal meetings, no sales calls, no long lunches. Just that challenge
We offer the following broad services:
Validate an idea - Validate and test new ideas using interactive prototypes.
Improve and existing product - Re-energise your product and team in just 5 days
Design a new product - Take your idea from concept to MVP in weeks,
not months
If you are building a mobile app, or a web app, SaaS product, or any other digital product, there tends to be three stages:
There is no design and development hasn’t started
There is a rough design, or a bad design, and development hasn’t started
Development has started, and it is distressed - either because it’s not what everyone thought it was, or it has been designed by a developer
We always advocate for the following:
Design the product first. Design every screen, every error message, button state, badge, field state, empty screens, everything first. Design is relatively cheap, both in terms of labour costs and also in time.
Building the wrong product is a waste of money and more importantly, time. We help people design the right product first time
Speeding up product development - it may seem like designing every screen before development begins is a waste time time. Everyone is itching to start writing code. But by designing the screens, the workflows, the user journeys, everyone is then able to see visually how the system will work, and you can then make sure everyone agrees before a single line of code is written
Battle testing - getting everyone on the project around a visual prototype and battle testing it before writing code is the cheapest and most time effective way of developing a product - changing a page graphically is quicker than changing it in code
Giving developers a straight line - Developers need clarity on user journeys, what goes on a page, all the icons, the colour palette, etc. Giving them everything they need so that they can build the product without having to think about user interface, colours and icons will result in a quicker development time, and happier developers. Our work means that developers are asking less questions, and spending more time developing
We also advocate for designing the entire system before the development team estimates how long it’ll take:
Designing every screen and creating a clickable prototype gives developers a lot more information, meaning they can ask better questions and they can provide a more accurate quote
Designing the entire system first also means that when the fully developed system is created, it gives stakeholders something to compare against.
In terms of results, deliverables and outcomes, this is our thoughts:
We work in an app called Figma. The reason we can work so quickly is because figma is multi-player. i.e. two or more designers can be working on the same canvas
Our deliverables are the Figma file that can be delivered to the developers, a clickable prototype to show the app actually working (albeit graphically), and a design system which is like an index of all fonts, colours, icons and components
The outcomes are more nuanced - we take clients from being fuzzy around what they’re building to having greater clarity. We unblock bottlenecks because in a lot of companies the design is what holds up development and product development. We help clients battle test new features and turn around failing products, or simply bring an idea in their head into reality.
Target market
Who exactly is our target market? Who are we sending emails to, what are their job titles, location, company size, industry, etc
Mainly in the UK, but we do have a couple of clients in the US
Head of Product / Product Owner / Product Director - most engagements we deal with someone in “product”.
CTO - depending on the size of the company we deal a lot with the CTO
COO - not really tried with the COO, but could be an option
CMO - again, not really tried with marketing people, but in about half our engagements someone in Marketing is present
In terms of companies, we think these are the most likely to need our services:
What we think is our primary clients:
UK companies - up to ~400 people, with no in-house designers, with a digital product
Funded startups - early stage, again with no in-house designers, we’ve had success with fintech companies
Venture Capital - VCs with portfolio companies that need help with UX design and product design
Problem that we solve
In other words, share at least 3-5 pain points your clients are known to have.
No in-house designers - they don’t have an in-house design team. They have either hired designers in the past and it hasn’t worked out, or the designer got bored with the work (a lot of design work is boring, everyone wants to work on Nike or Apple), they have tried freelancers but they’ve been unreliable, expensive, mercenary… or they don’t know where to find UI/UX designers with experience, without being ripped off
Reliability - when hiring an agency, there is no deadline. You think there is, but by the time they’ve done discovery, then allocated a team, and then gone through their process and delivering a piece of creative every three days, soon enough weeks have passed.
A-Team - in the sales process, agencies tend to put their best people forward, and when they win the project, it’s junior designers and even outsourced designers actually doing the work. This means delays, sub-standard work, bad file naming, etc. With our sprints, either myself or Matt will always be working directly on the project… most of the time both of us will be working on the project
Timescales - design agencies are notoriously bad with timescales and deadlines. You can hire a freelancer but they tend to have 5+ clients at any one time and he’s juggling them all. Same with an agency. We’re different. Fixed start and end date, fixed price
Continuity - on a lot of projects, the design has been done by a mix of in-house designers, freelancers, and multiple people. The result is a mix of styles, fonts, colours, icons, button styles, etc. There is no consistency. And so when the business want to add a feature, they have to get a designer in who’ll invariably add to the mess. At Precode, we believe in laying foundations in the form of a Design System. A Design System is an index of everything - fonts, icons, colour, button styles, form styles, logos. Everything. So that we maintain consistency and a continuous design cycle
What do we sell
I think that existing clients like the idea of the designing being “done”. As in, they book us in for one or two 5-Day UX Sprints, and they know that at the end of that engagement the design is done, and they can pass it to the development team. That problem has been solved, that bottleneck cleared
We think we sell them on the following:
The outcome, and the sense of it being “done”
Our expertise - Matt and I will be the lead designers on their projects. We have worked on projects for Apple, Audi, Land Rover, Jaguar, FSCS, JustLend, ETX Capital, Echo, Tech Mahindra, Co-op, Navmii, Voxelmaps, Aviva, Induction Healthcare, AXA, Earth Archive, Shepper, Virgin, Dominos, Ferrari, Lamborginhi, etc, etc.
The speed - relates to the above, but by combining expertise and experience we get the job done quicker
No Busywork - I’ll describe below
We’re the antithesis of the traditional agency - we’re lean, agile, no junior designers, you get the “a-team”, etc - see https://www.precode.co/about
No Busywork: When you pay for a design agency, at least 50% of your budget is going to “busywork”. This is simply work that keeps the agency employees busy, but has absolutely no value for you Yeah, we know that design agencies don’t like when we point this out, but it’s true: The large-scale, complicated hierarchies and superstar creative directors that were once key to agencies’ successes are now exactly what’s putting them in the ground. As agencies struggle to “go digital” and adapt their existing structure to a world that no longer has time to hang around and wait for them to get it right, we ask “Why should a project take 6 months, when it could take 8 days?”. No busy-work. Promise.
Results
Results you've gotten for your clients in the past. Have they profited from working with you? What niche are they in? And how did they become a client in the first place?
We don’t have any quantifiable tangible results. i.e our clients increased sales by 56% on average. Nothing like that.
But what they do get is the following:
Design is solved - i.e. we can design an entire mobile app in 1-2 weeks, and it gets handed to a developer and created for cheaper than it would if there was no design
Better products, faster - by designing the product first, we reduce the development time, and therefore the overall time-to-market.
Accurate development - giving a development team a full set of screens means that the development team can provide a more accurate quote and a more accurate development plan and deliver the project quicker
Products with better user experience - Users now expect better user experiences
Case studies
Guarantee or money back?
No
USP
What makes you unique and different from your competitors? Your USP
Our 5-Day UX Sprint - https://www.precode.co/ux-sprints Our On-Demand service - https://www.precode.co/on-demand
Our concept of No Busywork Only the A-team - no juniors 20+ year experience in designing successful digital products
Hiring
Are the companies you would like us to target currently hiring any specific roles that would give us insight into their need for your offer?
UX Designers
UI Designers
Product Designers
Digital Product Designers
Technologies
Do your prospects use any specific technologies, that we can base our targeting on?
Keywords
Please provide a list of as many keywords as possible that we can use to scan for when building a list of ideal prospects in your target market.
UX design
UI design
Product design
Figma
Scripting
Our scripting is QUESTION based. Are there any questions you can think of that your prospects would likely respond to?
Do you have an in-house design team?
Do you work with a design team?
Is UI design blocking your product development?
Do you customers find your app/web app difficult to use?
Do you get a lot of support requests because your product could be designed better?
Is your product team slowing down the growth of your company?
Is your product slowing down the growth of your company?
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