How growing businesses can leverage big-company UX strategies

By Nick Foster

It’s a tale as old as the app store: a promising startup launches with a brilliant idea and a sleek prototype. But six months later, the app faded into obscurity. What went wrong? They skipped a critical step: truly getting to know their users.

It’s not that these companies don’t care about their users. Many want to understand their audience but assume obtaining user insight requires a big budget that they don't have. But what if there was a way to leverage the same strategies as tech giants without the overhead?

As the owner of a UX design firm that has worked with products ranging from no users to hundreds of thousands of them, I’m going to show you how leaner companies can use the same big-player design strategies to build products that truly stand out. 

The scalability of user-centric design

User-centric design (UCD) prioritizes real user input at every stage of design. It involves gathering insights through interviews, feedback, and data analysis to guide UX design. If you’re thinking, “We don’t have the resources for that,” here’s how smaller firms can use their agility to “right-size” the UCD process:

Keep it simple

UCD can be as simple as asking users some basic pre-planned questions and/or reviewing your existing data to identify behavioural trends. For example, a product team struggling with maintaining its user base can focus on identifying friction points. In one case I worked on, talking to users and using data to understand behaviours led to moving a product from a mobile app to a progressive web app, streamlining navigation and improving user flows immediately, all with limited resources. 

Quick calls, big payoffs

Lean teams can move faster, prototype ideas, and iterate quickly. Without corporate bureaucracy, they can implement impactful changes efficiently. This agility allows them to test, refine, change course, and implement quickly while still making informed, data-driven decisions. Without the constraints of large-scale corporate bureaucracy, they can implement changes with broad-reaching effects, shaping the user experience in meaningful ways.

One small tech company my firm worked with used this agility to develop a monetization feature balancing business goals with user needs. By using a “right-sized” approach, they uncovered a key insight: users were strongly against monthly subscriptions. Without this insight, they might have launched a model that alienated users. By aligning new paid features with real-world preferences uncovered through research, they delivered a solution that met business objectives while keeping user needs at the forefront. This combination of focus and flexibility helped their team solve a key growth challenge while strengthening their relationship with users. 

Designing products users love: where to start

Not sure where to begin? Start with these three steps:

Start small: Conduct a few user interviews to identify key insights. Ask about goals, pain points, and friction areas. Try these five simple questions:

• What’s working for you?

• What’s not working?

• What do you find confusing? 

• If you had a magic wand, how would you improve your experience?

• What would the perfect product do to solve your problem? 

Validate or disprove your assumptions: Never assume you know what needs to be built. Continuously test ideas and iterate designs based on real user feedback. At our firm, we’ll often iterate designs between user interviews to test new ideas based on feedback we just heard.

Ask for help when needed: If you recognize a problem but don’t know how to fix it, have tried multiple solutions without success, or lack internal design expertise, consider partnering with an external design team to help get you out of the weeds and chart a clear path forward. It might be time to seek additional support if you:

• Recognize a problem but don’t know how to fix it

• Tried multiple solutions, but nothing sticks

• Lack the right type of designer or internal capacity

• Appreciate great design but struggle to pinpoint your challenges

• Hit a plateau and need a strategic push

• Have a team that is developer-led

Design firms as strategic partners

External design firms provide uniquely flexible, targeted support, acting as an extension of your team. They can move quickly, prototype, test, and “right-size” the user-centric design process to meet any size company wherever they’re at. Partnering with an outside firm is like hiring a seasoned guide for an unfamiliar trail — your organization retains critical institutional knowledge because you remain actively engaged in the journey. Unlike full-service agencies that deliver finished work in a silo, boutique firms collaborate with you, guiding research, prioritization, and design to equip you with the tools to move forward confidently.

If you need guidance, I run Sixzero, and we can help. With years of experience designing impactful digital products, we tailor user research strategies to fit any company size. Let’s work together to turn your product vision into a user-driven success story.

Nick Foster is the founder of Sixzero, an agency that helps companies design apps and software with impact.