Have you ever been asked to get creative? Or told to think outside the box? If so, you might have had one of two reactions (or maybe a combination of the two):

1. Hooray! No restrictions. Let’s go! 
2. Yikes! The possibilities are endless. Where do I start?

Regardless of how you might react, it’s crucial to keep the original ask in mind — not “get creative,” but the reason you were charged with getting creative or thinking outside of the box in the first place. Losing sight of the goal or falling into the trap of thinking that a strategic approach isn’t actually “creative” are the fastest ways to the land of no progress and stifled creativity. 

I think the best ideas come out of a harmonious combination of strategic and creative thinking. I’m not the only one; product designers often have a foundations-first approach to their work where they consider a baseline strategy before jumping into high-fidelity mock-ups. Strategists leverage innovation workshops to both strategically and creatively problem solve. And developers weigh cost and functionality tradeoffs when designing and building reproducible and deployable systems.

Problem solving, creative thinking, and focus are universal components of work-life – and life-life. Leveraging a tool to help you do all three isn’t a cop out, it's a way to help you get to the fun stuff (the ideas worth doing) faster. 

One tool that can help you confidently pursue your idea is an Impact and Feasibility Matrix, which will help you focus and narrow in. Your focus will keep you on track, and narrowing in on what ideas are worth doing will illuminate the way forward. Let’s dive in… 

Focus

Step one is keeping your goal in mind. To do so, revisit these questions often:

• How does this help solve the problem?
• How does this contribute to an ideal outcome?

Narrow In

Step two is identifying which creative idea is worth pursuing. One way I like to narrow in and confidently move forward is by plotting ideas on an Impact + Feasibility matrix. 

Impact is:

• Reach. What percentage of your audience or stakeholders will be impacted by your idea?
• Relevance. Does your idea target your key audience? 
• Longevity. How long will your idea impact your team? 

Feasibility is:

• Costs. What are your hard costs? This includes both the time investment and monetary investment. 
• Ease. How easy is your idea to execute? Is this something you can tackle on your own? Will you need to outsource your idea to a partner or vendor? 

The answers to all of these will be unique to your role, the problem you are trying to solve, and your organization. That said, somewhere between impact and feasibility, usually in the upper right quadrant of the matrix, is your sweet spot. This is true regardless of role, problem, or organization. Ideas in the sweet spot are usually worth doing. They reach a relevant audience for your targeted time frame, they are achievable, and within budget.  

Your impact and feasibility matrix will be unique to each problem you are trying to solve. Let’s take a look at some real examples. 

Examples

Problem: Help a newly distributed team settle in to working remotely. 

In the spring of 2020, many organizations (Viget included), were charged with supporting newly distributed teams. Throughout that year, we focused on surprising our team in new ways (think care packages containing branded sweatpants), removing barriers to communication, and improving access to resources (we implemented People Team office hours which we still keep to this day). We did send everyone their favorite candy and had local folks help deliver monitors to their teammates. We still don’t have Viget branded dog swag – maybe one day. 

Problem: Help team members get to know each other during weekly company-wide meetings. 

Each week, we host a company-wide all hands meeting. It’s a tradition we’ve kept since we were founded in 1999. The meeting has evolved over the years and so has our strategy for connection. This is a matrix we revisit often, some ideas we tweak and try again and others like requiring cameras-on or implementing a roll call isn’t something we would consider doing. 

To Sum It Up

The next time you find yourself spinning your wheels, or better yet, the next time you're tasked with thinking outside the box, focus first and plot your ideas on the impact/feasibility matrix. Doing so will help keep you on track and quickly narrow in on which ideas are worth pursuing. 

Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) is May 16, 2024! GAAD was created to help bring attention and awareness to digital inclusivity. No matter your role on a project team, digital accessibility should always be a priority from start to finish. Why is accessibility so important?

• Over 1 billion people worldwide have a disability, and that number is growing every day
• 15% of people with disabilities say they never go online, compared to 5% of people without disabilities, according to Pew Research Center
• According to a survey by Click-Away Pound, 71% of disabled users are forced to leave a website if they find it difficult to use

Digital accessibility directly impacts people’s ability to access information, buy products, apply for jobs, engage in discussion, and everything else that people do online that is becoming critical for modern life. Accessible spaces even benefit people without disabilities, as it allows anyone to take in content though their preferred method (reading the captions on a video instead of listening in a noisy environment, for example), and often breeds innovation as engineers work to find the best way to be sure everyone can access information equally.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has developed the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) in an effort to standardize digital accessibility. However, many websites unfortunately fail to meet these standards, leading to a lesser-quality user experience. WebAIM’s yearly report has highlighted some surprising statistics about WCAG across the top 1,000,000 home pages:

• The most common accessibility failure across home pages is low contrast text
• 98.1% of home pages have at least one WCAG 2.0 failure
• On average, there are 56.8 accessibility errors per page (this increased 13.6% from 2023!) 
• 16.8% of home pages had more than one <h1> tag

As you can see, there is still a lot of work that needs to be done to create a more accessible web for everyone. If you’re interested in learning more about digital accessibility and how to improve accessibility on your own projects, there are plenty of resources and online courses available. Resources range from free, to paid courses, to professional certifications. Below are some courses and resources that we recommend.

Free Courses and Resources

If you’re looking to introduce yourself to digital accessibility, these free resources are a great place to start:  

• A11ycasts with Rob Dodson - A series of video tutorials on YouTube that highlights topics including semantics, focus, the correct way to use a button, and a11y testing
• The Beginner’s Guide to Web Accessibility - An article by Dequeue University that summarizes why digital accessibility should be a priority, and how to determine if your website is accessible
• Common Mistakes with Using Colour in Accessibility - Digital designer Andrée Lange provides insights into how to take color contrast into consideration when designing for the web
• Deque Accessibility Resources - Dequeue offers a variety of free accessibility resources, including webinars, blog posts, and their accessibility testing browser extension, axe DevTools
• HTML Semantics and Accessibility Cheat Sheet - WebAIM provides a list of the most common HTML tags that have an impact on digital accessibility
• MDN Accessibility Tutorials - MDN is an open-source project documenting web technologies, which also includes an informative section on web accessibility documentation and best practices
• Section 508 ICT Testing Baseline - Outlines minimal accessibility testing requirements for federal agencies subject to Section 508
• WCAG 2.2 Quick Reference - WCAG are a series of web accessibility guidelines released and maintained by the W3C, with 2.2 being the current version of the guidelines. This page provides a reference to standards that websites should meet in order to meet current accessibility standards
• Web.dev Learn Accessibility Course - A series of informative articles ranging from beginning a11y topics, to more advanced topics including animation and motion

Deep Dives with Paid Tutorials

If you’re a developer who has experience in accessibility and want to dig more into the topic, these comprehensive tutorials will help you improve your a11y knowledge:

• Accessible Web Academy - Accessible Web Academy includes more focused a11y courses for designers, developers, content creators, and marketers looking to target specific topics 
• Inclusive Components - There is a free online summary of Heydon Pickering’s Inclusive Components, but you can also purchase an eBook on the topic. Heydon’s blog provides examples of a pattern library that bakes accessibility into each component
• Practical Accessibility by Sara Soueidan - Sara Souedien is a prolific front-end developer who specializes in accessibility. Her course, Practical Accessibility, is a comprehensive guide for all developers, from those looking to familiarize themselves with accessibility, to experienced developers looking to expand their a11y knowledge.

Advanced Knowledge with Certifications

• If you want to take the next step and become a certified professional in accessibility, IAAP offers professional certifications in digital accessibility:
  • IAAP offers five certification options, CPACC, WAS, CPWA, ADS, and CPABE
  • Deque University offers a curriculum to help prepare for IAAP certification exams
• The Department of Homeland Security also offers a “Trusted Tester” certification for Section 508 compliance
• W3C offers a free Digital Accessibility Foundations course, with an optional verified certificate ($99) upon course completion

As the world’s population and number of disabled users continues to grow, it’s clear that implementing digital accessibility in your products is more important than ever. By implementing the information from these lists, you can help users of all abilities access the content that you share, ensuring a better internet for everyone.

We just celebrated 24 years of Viget. That’s two dozen years! This year, our Spring TTT in celebration of “Viget24” was a virtual extravaganza. We’ve put on a lot of virtual events over the years. Some with really strong themes and swag bags; some that focus on simple, meaningful time together; and others that let us enjoy learning something new as a team. Regardless of the rest of the experience, a key component of all of our virtual events is joy, achieved often through intentional levity. We think it’s important to laugh together! We see laughter as a way to expedite connection, and connection leads to rapport which makes us better at collaborating — and in turn leads to more quality products for our clients. 

Experimenting and iterating is a critical way we try to continually get delight right. We’re pretty pleased with one of our experiments from Viget24 that we called “Lovely Spring Day”.

A Lovely Spring Day

As we were brainstorming for this TTT, we thought about how to throw some joyful levity pizzazz into the pieces of our virtual events puzzle that have become pretty standard. How do we add lots of delight without adding lots of time to the action-packed schedule? We zeroed in on the virtual backgrounds we’ve been creating for every event — they add a layer of specialness. Of place. This isn’t any old virtual meeting. This is a TTT! 

Another key consideration for our team is figuring out creative ways to tie in inspiration from our industry and our work. AI has been an obvious contender —  we’ve discussed it and tied it in to some extent for the past several TTTs. But this time, we wanted to see how we could use AI for delight — marrying it with virtual backgrounds felt obvious. And so, a ”Lovely Spring Day” was born. 

The TL;DR is that we generated custom virtual backgrounds for every Viget employee that encapsulates their “ideal spring day.” We then played a 15-minute guessing game where people tried to guess who the background “belonged to.” Then, people had access to the full folder of AI-generated virtual backgrounds to look through. Vigets could then choose the background that spoke to them most and set it as their background. 

Read on for more on how we put this together!

Pre-Event Survey

To support all of our TTTs, we send out thoughtful pre-event logistics surveys 2-3 weeks before the big day. The survey lets us know where folks are joining from (where can we send their activity + snack packages?) and gives folks a chance to provide input on how the People Team can help folks enjoy and be present for TTT. This time, we also snuck in three questions, just “for giggles.”

• In one sentence, describe your ideal spring day.
• List three things that spark joy.
• What color do you think suits you best?

We did not share why we asked these questions. Sneaky, sneaky! When it’s low-key like this, the element of surprise is often a quick way to level up the delight.

Asking for a Friend

With rich data in hand about what makes people happy in spring, we were ready to generate the backgrounds. I was stoked! I’ve been experimenting with ChatGPT for some time, so it was fun to be able to use the DALL-E 3 side of OpenAI’s GPT-4 model. 

Who knew Prompt Engineering would be part of my role as a recruiter-who-helps-support-TTT-planning? I played around with a couple different prompts to generate these background images. Ultimately, my goal was to create backgrounds that were meaningfully different from one another but still felt good (i.e., something you might feasibly want to set as your virtual background and nothing freakily AI, like uncanny valley hands).

Here are the prompts I landed on that got me to our set of virtual backgrounds:

• Please generate an image (dimensions of a virtual meeting background) that encapsulates the vibe of a day with [ BLANK ].
• Please generate an image (dimensions of a virtual meeting background) that features [ BLANK ].

In the blanks, I wrote the things people included in their surveys. Those blanks were filled with everything ranging from dogs, cats, and friends to beverages, specific temperatures, yard games, carbohydrates, hammocks and more! Sometimes, I’d include a detail I knew about that person myself, even if it wasn’t in their survey. Yes, I occasionally editorialized for both clarity and whimsy! This was for delight purposes, but also helped serve my goal of having the backgrounds be “meaningfully different from one another.” It’s amazing how many people’s ideal spring day is as simple as having 1) moderate temperatures and 2) no pollen!

I generated 55 images. Throughout the process, DALL-E nailed it. I only needed to regenerate 2 or 3 images with clarifiers (and only because they included AI-specific outliers like disembodied hands). Huzzah!

Here are some of my favorites, along with their prompts in the captions. Can you guess who they belong to?

IRL

Ok, so for the actual activity we had the images ready to go in a private Google Folder. I took twelve of the images and put them in a very simple deck. I shared my screen, introduced the activity, and invited people to guess who they think each image belonged to in Slack. It was so fun seeing people throw out guesses and then narrow in with any verbal hints I gave!

Each image took about a minute. Then, we shared access to the Google Folder, gave folks a couple minutes to choose a background that called to them (their own image or someone else’s), and set it as their background. It felt like a magical moment to witness people finding and resonating with their own image or delighting in the ridiculousness of their coworkers’. We saved about 5 minutes for this piece, which felt right.

The whole Lovely Spring Day activity took just over 15 minutes! It was a perfect way to transition from a long meal break into our next grouping of content. And, we got to see the different backgrounds throughout the rest of the meeting.

Oh, the humanity!

I think this activity was successful for a couple of reasons.

1. People laughed! 

2. People felt seen. Some of these backgrounds were incredibly on point. Some of that was due to key folks having well-documented interests and a Slack-Famous Dog. 

But some of it was due to the People Team knowing about our people — our coworkers — beyond the sentence they wrote in. This uniquely human involvement helped me call an audible as needed and tweak prompts slightly to make the backgrounds feel even more relatable.

3. We could commiserate about our eventual AI overlords. (Did you notice that I say “please” in my prompts?!) Listen, Viget has plenty of practical, healthily skeptical people who are dubious about AI. GenAI is not always a fun, lighthearted thing. But using it in a fun, lighthearted way to do something it’s really good at was a nice use case and thought-provoking exposure even for people who are not into it.

4. We could see where we all align, and where we differ! It was amazing to see just how many people love picnics, covet their caffeine, and appreciate a bike ride. It was also cool to see some unique folks who simply crave a rainy spring day, or some beloved Buc-ee’s. What a rich tapestry of individuals — literally!

Authentication! What a hassle!

Self-Hosting

Integrations

Customization

Conclusion

When onboarding a new partner to redesign your website, take over maintenance, or rescue a project going sideways, you'll need to carefully transition access to a variety of critical systems and tools. And if you're navigating a contentious relationship or onboarding into a new organization without documentation, you might not know where to start.

Does that sound scary? It doesn't have to be. 

Here's a comprehensive checklist to ensure that you retain full control of your website and avoid any potential hiccups during a transition.

1. Codebase access. Ensure you have ownership or administrative access to the existing codebase or code repository. Popular platforms like Bitbucket and GitHub are often used for this purpose.
2. Content Management System access. Ensure you have the highest level of access (super admin) for your Content Management System (CMS). 
3. Hosting information and access. Gather all hosting information and ensure you have access to the account that owns the workspace. This is crucial to prevent unauthorized updates or changes to your site. For hosted platforms, you’ll need Owner access, not just Administrator access. 
4. Additional services information and access. This might include your domain registrar (e.g., GoDaddy), DNS settings, email services, your content delivery network (CDN), if applicable. This could also include any third-party services that are integrated with your website. Common examples might include: Algolia, Hubspot, Stripe, etc. 
5. Analytics and Data. Make sure you have access to all analytics tools used to monitor your website traffic and user behavior. This might include both old Google Universal Analytics data and current GA4 data, Google Tag Manager, or any other analytics services used on your website (e.g., Mixpanel, Hotjar, Adobe Analytics, etc.). 
6. Backups. Secure a full backup of your site, including the file system. Plugins like UpdraftPlus for WordPress can be very helpful for this process. Also, ensure you have backups of shared files, such as those in Google Drive, Box, or Dropbox.
7. Design Assets. Retain copies of raw design assets (e.g., Figma files). We always transfer ownership of Figma files to our client teams to ensure they have the ability to extend the design system in the future.
8. Licenses. Make sure you own any required licenses, such as font/photo licenses, CMS licenses, API keys, or premium plugins. We insist that our client teams purchase any required licenses/subscriptions using their corporate information so we’re never blocking access to those critical resources.

Transitioning website partners can be a smooth process with foresight and preparation. While ideally there would never be gaps in access to these critical resources and services, by following this checklist, you can ensure that you’re not missing anything when offboarding old partners or getting your bearings with a new team or organization. 

Do you need help figuring out how this checklist might apply to your situation? Be in touch, and we’d be happy to discuss your current status and suggest next steps for your website transition. 

Behavioral analytics are a great way to get a sense of what users are or are not doing on your website or app. While behavioral analytics may not provide insights into why users are behaving a certain way, this method does provide a quick and cost-effective way to see what your users are currently doing at scale. Knowing how your users are engaging with your website or product can help you make informed decisions that have a positive impact on engagement and conversions.

Here at Viget, we use behavioral analytics data for a number of use cases:

1. Our client has a specific question about a certain aspect of their website or app (e.g., a specific user flow or content type) and wants to learn more about how and when users are engaging. 
2. We are redesigning a client’s website and want to get a sense of where the current experience is excelling or falling short.
3. We are conducting an annual analysis to help clients keep an eye on potential areas of growth or stagnation. 
4. We are reviewing behavioral changes on a site or app after launching a new experience or feature to assess performance.

But what kind of insights can you expect to find from behavioral analytics data? 

It ultimately depends on the website or app, the users, and the kinds of questions you are asking, but let’s go through a few different examples of what kind of information you can gain from behavioral analytics tools.

Who is using your website or product?

Understanding who is using your website can provide helpful context on your user base and potentially unlock growth with new user groups you may have been unaware of. To investigate this, we may look at geographic location, language, device type, and any other demographic information that may be available. Sometimes this kind of data provides what I like to call descriptive information—information that often doesn’t feel immediately actionable but can become more useful relative to other data points. This could come from comparing your data to last year, to industry standards, to other content on the website, or it might come from comparing it to an assumption that an individual or organization holds. 

Here are some examples of findings that shed light on who was using the website or product:

How do users get to your website or product?

Knowing how users navigate to your website or product can highlight what traffic sources are particularly effective in driving conversions, but it can also help to provide important context on user expectations or goals. To understand this, we look at both the source/medium that brought them to the website as well as the first page they viewed. 

For example, users might:

• Come from google and land on a blog article
• Go directly to your home page
• Come from an email referral to a donation page 
• Learn about you from ChatGPT and land on your About page

From there, we might look at engagement rate, conversion rates, or other metrics to get a sense of what these users are doing and whether anything stands out as particularly effective or ineffective. 

Here are some examples of acquisition insights that informed our understanding and approach:

What content or features do users engage with?

Here is where we start to get to the meat of what your users are actually doing on your website or product. Knowing what users are doing and what they’re not using can help to establish priorities and inform decisions. You might be surprised to learn that users are actually engaging with specific features or content quite a bit, but others are barely used. If the content or feature is surprisingly popular, then we likely don’t want to outright remove it and may instead consider iterating or leveraging that offering more. If users aren’t engaging with content or a feature, it may be worth considering the effort to maintain and iterate on that offering. 

Here are some examples of engagement insights that helped us identify opportunities related to content or features:

What is the user journey or path?

Another major area of investigation is the sequence of steps users take when viewing content or completing certain actions. This could be perusing content on the website, going through a signup funnel, or checking out to make a purchase. 

This helps us identify:

• the actual paths that lead to conversions (which is not always the path we assume it is) 
• areas where users drop off at key points in the funnel
• moments where users have to “turn around” in the journey, because the path laid before them doesn’t align with their needs 

This information can help you build towards a frictionless experience that encourages users to sign up, complete a purchase, or find the resources they need.

Here are some examples of user journey insights that helped us understand where there were existing points of friction for users:

What “turning around” in the user journey can look like:

What dropoff can look like at different stages:

The Ecosystem at Large

Some clients have a larger ecosystem of products or services, and it’s important to look at how users engage with and navigate across the ecosystem. This might include subdomains for a shop, a marketing site versus the product site, help documentation, etc. By looking at the larger ecosystem we can reveal important connections that are missing or connections that could be strengthened.

Here are some examples of insights that demonstrated a need for changes in those ecosystem connections:

Here at Viget, there are a wide variety of insights we may discover for any one project through behavioral analytics. These insights can help to identify new user groups, help to prioritize content or features maintenance and updates, or bring to attention moments in the user journey that are causing friction. These opportunities can help you bring in new users and retain your existing users, by providing an experience that aligns with their needs, whether that is finding resources, getting involved in a community, or making a purchase.  

If you’re interested in making your website or application more effective for your users by leveraging the power of behavioral analytics data, we’d love to hear from you. 

In recent years, as distributed work has become the norm, all-hands trips have become more commonplace. Even companies that have always done them now see their importance in a new light. They are expensive and demanding for everyone involved, but when they’re done well they can be incredibly impactful. Are you bringing your team together and feeling the stress of getting it right? Designing the time together takes strategic thinking, logistics planning, and the confidence to ask everyone to contribute to the event’s success.

Last week, we came together to connect, celebrate each other, and look forward to a bright future in our quarterly all-hands event we call Third Third Thursday or TTT. It was our first in-person all-hands event since May 2023. At Viget, we actively build our culture together. The responsibility doesn’t fall on just a few individuals' shoulders. Our events are successful because individuals show up, speak up, listen, and honor the limited time we have together in-person. This is evident in the chats over breakfast pastries, the all-in approach to competitions breakout sessions, and the peer talks and discussions throughout our events. This connection and camaraderie doesn’t just happen, we work hard to make it happen. 

Reflecting on last week’s event (and 7 years of other events), I want to share these five key planning tips to help you craft a successful event. 

Leverage your physical space to help achieve your event goals. This fall we had a smaller number of attendees and we wanted to encourage discussion throughout the event so we set up the room in large U shape to foster conversation. We also made the most of our exterior space, which featured a fire escape staircase, by hosting an egg drop competition. 

Over communicate, especially around when team members can expect breaks and when they can expect to be fed. As the event lead, I share my phone number multiple times ahead of and throughout the event. We also make sure to communicate in dedicated channels, including an event Slack channel for all attendees, a behind-the-scenes Slack channel for presenters only, and an event website. We share important key information like bus schedules and flight confirmations via email. In advance of the big day, we shared this slide with our team to both inform and inspire. 

Leave room for unstructured time and connection. Over the years we learned that some of the best discussions and a-ha moments come from chats over a meal or a snack during the “unplanned” parts of the event. Now we plan ahead for these, leaving ample time for unplanned, impromptu a-has. We think about airport Uber rides, charter bus rides, morning runs, evening board games, or late-night drinks and look for ways to grease the wheels of serendipity. This was especially important for us this fall since it had been so long since the last time we all gathered together. 

Look for ways to celebrate what is unique to your company. One pretty fantastic thing that comes with a quarter century in business is the community we’ve built along the way. We make a point to keep up with previous Viget employees who we proudly call our alumni. We love our alumni and enjoy recognizing their contributions to Viget. One way we do so is with annual picnics, which we host when the most current Viget employees are in town for an event. These picnics are often a great mix of reconnections and networking.

Find ways to surprise and delight. Think big and small. For example, this fall we put colored pencils and butcher block paper out during our meeting time. Our autumnal decor included blue(ish) and orange pumpkins (Viget colors!). We made a subtle callout to an internal project by serving french fries as our afternoon snack. And we surprised our team with Unreal treats for their bus rides home. The treats served as dessert and a means for us to introduce our next in-person event, our spring TTT, aka Viget25. 

Some companies advocate for all-hand retreats to be social and relaxing, but not “productive.” They tout a meeting-free event. At Viget, we see the meeting time as crucial because that is when peers share knowledge, reflect on their recent work, showcase client impact, and highlight new ideas and personal growth. Similarly, our co-founders reflect on Viget’s performance and share thoughts on the upcoming business direction. The meeting sparks genuine inspiration and creates a time for us to remember what brought us to Viget in the first place – to build world class tech in support of our clients. 

On the heels of a successful gathering, it’s time to start planning the next one. For our next event we’ll head to the Allegheny Mountains where we’ll leverage a unique and memorable venue, offer plenty of unstructured time for connection (with each other and nature), loop in alumni where appropriate, plan inspiring meeting content, enjoy many meals and treats together, and of course find ways to surprise and delight. 

Work-related travel isn't for everyone, but if you know someone who appreciates the idea of dedicated time to connect with and celebrate their peers, we’re hiring. And to all the culture champions and event planners out there, good luck with your next all-hands! 

When choosing an outsourcing partner for design and development, many decision-makers naturally start by comparing hourly rates. At first glance, it seems logical: a lower hourly rate means lower project costs, right?

The truth is, hourly rates can be a misleading metric. The actual cost of outsourcing is much more complex than the dollar amount tied to hourly rates. In this article, we’ll explore why focusing on hourly rates can obscure the true cost of a project and why it’s crucial to dig deeper when evaluating potential partners. I’ll end by suggesting a few things to focus on instead of or in addition to the hourly rate.

Efficiency vs. Hourly Rates

Imagine you have two outsourcing options for a specific task:

• Pat: A developer who charges $100/hour and takes 3 hours to complete the task. 
• Terry: A developer who charges $200/hour but only takes 2 hours to complete the same task.

Pat’s hourly rate is lower and Pat’s total cost looks cheaper. The total cost for Pat is $300, while for Terry, it's $400. But there's more at play than the hourly breakdown.

Terry may be faster because they are more skilled, experienced, or familiar with the problem. They produce a higher-quality output that might need little to no revision, while Pat may deliver work requiring additional oversight, rework, or fine-tuning.

This brings us to a crucial point: efficiency and expertise often outweigh raw hourly cost.

Hidden Costs of Oversight and Management

The cost of managing lower-cost teams can quickly add up. Inexperienced or less skilled developers often require more:

• Guidance and supervision: You or your in-house team may have to spend significant time managing or directing work, which adds hidden costs to the project.
• Rework and revisions: Less-experienced teams may not get it right the first time, and even small mistakes can snowball into major issues that need to be fixed later on.
• Communication barriers: Some outsourcing teams might not be as effective in communicating progress or roadblocks, which can slow down the entire project and lead to missed deadlines.

Each of these factors chips away at the apparent "savings" from choosing a lower hourly rate.

Quality: The Long-Term Investment

Design and development work (insourced or outsourced) is an investment, not just a cost. High-quality work may come with a higher hourly rate, but the long-term savings are substantial:

• Fewer bugs and technical debt: A more experienced development team will likely deliver better code, resulting in fewer bugs and long-term maintenance issues. A more experienced designer is more likely to think through and design for all edge cases, filling in all the gaps.
• Faster delivery: A skilled team is often more familiar with best practices, frameworks, and tools that allow them to complete tasks efficiently.
• Scalability: High-quality designers and developers think ahead and design systems that can scale with your needs, preventing costly future refactoring.

The Cost of "Cheap" Work

Sometimes, "cheap" work ends up being the most expensive in the long run. Lower-quality outsourcing might require you to:

• Hire another team to fix or rebuild the work.
• Delay product launches due to unanticipated project overruns.
• Damage customer trust by releasing subpar products riddled with bugs or poor design.

In some cases, teams that seem "affordable" may not have the expertise to foresee potential pitfalls, which means costly issues arise later in the process.

Calculating the Total Cost of Ownership

To truly compare outsourcing options, decision-makers should consider the total cost of ownership (TCO), not just the hourly rate. TCO includes:

• Efficiency: How quickly and effectively can the team complete the work?
• Oversight: How much management and guidance will the team require?
• Quality: Will the output meet your expectations, or will it need significant revisions or rework?
• Maintenance: What will it cost to maintain or scale the system after the initial work is done?

A team with a higher hourly rate but lower total costs in these areas may be the more cost-effective choice in the long run. For a more complete example:

• Pat: Your $100/hr developer completes a task in 3 hours ($300), requires 1 hour of oversight from an in-house Senior Developer ($150), and eventually needs to be refactored or rebuilt entirely ($1,000).
• Terry: Your $200/hr developer completed a task in 2 hours ($400) based on a 10-minute overview from an in-house Senior Developer ($15), and makes an above-and-beyond measurable impact on page performance (priceless).

The best long-term investment becomes more clear when you consider all the variables. 

Conclusion: Think Beyond Hourly Rates

When investing in design or development, your goal should be to maximize ROI, not minimize hourly rates. When comparing outsourcing options, focus on the bigger picture—their efficiency, quality, and the hidden costs of oversight and management. Consider how your prospective partners measure up in terms of:

• Results: can they point to clear results of their work in which they played some critical role?
• References: would previous clients choose to hire them again (indicating they are worth their cost)?
• Communication: do they respond quickly and with clarity?
• Expertise: do they provide opinions and advice or are they simply order takers?
• Relevance: is their prior experience directly relevant to your needs? 
• If not, do they have a track record for navigating novelty well?

The right team might not always be the cheapest on paper, but they’ll deliver the greatest long-term value. Outsourcing isn’t about getting work done cheaply—it’s about getting it done right, and more often than not, the old mantra “you get what you pay for” holds.