What is a Retainer?
A UX Retainer is a flexible ongoing partnership between you and Fracom UX. You pay a monthly fee for dedicated access to UX expertise for a capped number of hours per month. The Retainer allows you to add high-quality UX skill to your team without the overhead of hiring full-time staff.
Core Services Included in a UX Retainer
Research and Discovery
- User Research: Conducting user interviews, surveys, and contextual inquiries to understand user needs.
- Usability Evaluation: Running usability tests and analyzing performance to identify friction points.
- Analytics Analysis: Using data from tools like Google Analytics or Tableau to evaluate performance and validate design decisions.
- Content-Specific Research: Testing content clarity through techniques like 5-second tests and cloze testing.
Strategy and Architecture
- Product Strategy: Aligning design improvements with business goals, such as increasing conversion rates or reducing churn.
- Information Architecture (IA): Organizing content and creating intuitive navigation structures.
- User Journey Mapping: Mapping out the current user state and creating future-focused journeys to reduce friction.
Design and Prototyping (UI/UX)
- Wireframing and Prototyping: Creating low- to high-fidelity wireframes and interactive prototypes for testing or development.
- Interaction Design: Defining how the user interacts with the product and creating efficient, delightful interactions.
- UI Design & System Maintenance: Creating, maintaining, and updating design systems in tools like Figma to ensure consistency across the product.
Collaboration and Optimization
- Workshop Facilitation: Running workshops for ideation, sprint planning, and prioritization.
- CRO Strategy: Optimizing conversion rates by improving checkout flows and landing pages based on user feedback.
- Workshop Facilitation: Running workshops for ideation, sprint planning, and prioritization.
- Accessibility Compliance: Ensuring designs meet accessibility standards.
UX Retainer Timeline
Clients may choose a retainer as a project follow-on or as a strategic partnership.
- A Project Follow-On. Clients often choose a retainer to follow-on a standard UX design and development project. The purpose in such cases typically is to address user feedback or clickstream analytics that becomes available after a digital channel has already gone live.
- A Strategic Partnership. A strategic partnership is the ideal solution when you need a senior UX partner to provide guidance on an ongoing basis but can’t afford and don’t need to hire a permanent full time senior staff member.
Retainers normally guarantee access to a UX consultant for a capped number of hours per month. Retainers are available in 5 hour increments from 15 to 40 hours per month.
UX Retainer Deliverables
Our UX retainers include advising clients on actions to take to address new business objectives or emerging customer engagement challenges. Retainers may focus on iterative improvements, maintenance, and rapid development. These ongoing engagements often produce faster, agile, and iterative updates to live products rather than just foundational research.
Common Retainer UX Deliverables
Besides general UX advice, Retainers may also include a variety of different deliverables depending on a client’s specific needs using a particular month. Examples of such deliverables include the following:
- Lean UX Canvas: Normally a one-page deliverable documenting the results of a one or two day workshop aimed at identifying business objectives and desired outcomes and linking these to customer goals and needs to guide development of effective solutions.
- Prototyping: Interactive Figma/Sketch prototypes used to test new features or validate improvements to existing user flows.
- Wireframes: Quick, low-fidelity sketches or layouts to map out new feature structures or user paths.
- Usability Testing & Research: Reports and analysis of how users interact with the current digital channel, highlighting improvements.
- User Flows & Site Maps: Mapping out updated navigation, user journeys, or new feature flows.
- Design System Maintenance: Updating style guides, pattern libraries, and reusable components to ensure consistency across the product.
Benefits of a UX Retainer
A retainer often serves as a flexible extension of an in-house team, providing specialized skills like specialized user research that might not be available internally.
Continuous Improvement: Unlike one-off projects, retainers keep the product evolving, allowing for regular, iterative updates.
Consistency: A dedicated, retainer-based UX consultant ensures consistent quality and consistency across your digital channels.
Flexibility: Worked performed under a retainer can vary from month to month, depending on the client’s most urgent needs. For example, one month might focus on conducting quick usability tests or designing a new feature, without the need for new contracts. (Note that unused retainer hours do not roll-over to the next month.)
Engagement Details of this Package
Duration: One to twelve months.
Best for: Businesses with ongoing or unpredictable UX needs, especially those who require senior UX expertise but wish to avoid the overhead of hiring a full-time UX staff member.
Engagement model: Retainer with capped monthly hours.
Price Estimate: Beginning at $2,000 for 15 capped hours per month with discounts available for higher caps in increments of 5 hours from 15 to 40 capped hours.
