A few months ago, Clark Valberg started toying with the design of his company's website. The first thing he did was replace the "sign up" button on the home page with a "get started" button. Then, he changed the color of the "get started" button from green to hot orange. Within a month, said Mr. Valberg, that and a few other minor tweaks helped bump up the customer conversion rate by 25%.
Those small changes—and their big impact—underscore the growing importance of designers to Web companies.
"You need people who can think not only about how things look, but how they work," said Mr. Valberg, CEO of Invision, a Manhattan company that provides prototyping software. "Can you get to point A from point B with as few clicks as possible, and while you're going there, can we sell you something?"
Mr. Valberg's lead designer works out of California, and he has job postings out for two more UI, or user interface, designers.
Designers are a hotter talent than engineers in many quarters. Facebook has been buying up companies for their design talent, such as iPad book designer Pop Book Press. For less celebrated companies, it can take months to find a designer with a grasp of what it takes to craft a memorable and satisfying user experience.
Cliff Sirlin, co-founder of Project Décor, has prowled Maker Faires, networked with other entrepreneurs, and has even contacted a leading venture capitalist in the hope that he could recommend someone. The VC told him to send his children to design school. "We can't find people quick enough," he said.
"[Designers] are the people setting the tone for the site," said Mr. Sirlin. "They're thinking through the logic, creating the way in which the end user interfaces with the site."
The new breed of designer—artist, psychologist, coder and anthropologist rolled into one—follows the evolution of the Web. Over the past decade, many of the back-end problems of the Internet have been solved. Browsers are faster and broadband is ubiquitous.
Now, with dozens, if not hundreds of copycat websites vying for the same customers—there are 850 daily deal sites, for example, peddling discounts—one of the few places companies can gain a competitive edge is in the user experience. At the same time, the arrival of tablets and other mobile devices, as well as interactivity in venues, from store kiosks to museums, is stoking an almost unfillable demand for design talent.
Local Projects, a media design firm whose interactive work can be seen at the 9/11 Memorial, in Times Square and soon at the New York Hall of Science, currently has openings for four designers. Even when it fills a job, Local Projects doesn't take down the posting, expecting that its needs won't abate.
"Our best hires can code and innovate design around the new opportunities that code is allowing," said founder and principal Jake Barton.
The demand for talent also has spawned a niche recruiting industry. Manhattan-based Behance, which operates a site where artists and designers showcase their work, currently has 360 postings for designer jobs—including 70 in New York City—some of them posted by luminaries such as fashion designer Diane Von Furstenburg and film director and winegrower Francis Ford Coppola.
Founded in 2006, Manhattan-based Behance just got its first venture round in May: $6.5 million from Union Square Ventures, Amazon's Jeff Bezos and others. Dribbble.com, a Massachusetts site where designers display their portfolios and companies pay $200 to post a job, has been profitable from the beginning, said its founders, and companies like Google and AOL prowl the site for designers.
99Designs, a San Francisco platform where designers hang out and show their work, is an intermediary between companies and designers. It pays out $1.5 million a month to designers, double what it did a year ago.
"People are realizing that the real competitive advantage in a product is design, usability and the experience the user has interacting with it," said Dribbble co-founder Rich Thornett. "It's not just putting pretty colors on things. It's also problem-solving and thinking smart from the beginning."
And companies don't want just any designer. Interactive design, they say, is a unique talent. Mohammed Riza, for one, not only needs someone with artistic sensibility, but also a designer who can understand how students learn and interact with teachers. Mr. Riza is vice president of design at Brooklyn-based Wireless Generation, an 800-person company that develops online reporting systems and online curriculum and assessment tools for teachers and school administrators. One of its signature designs measures student achievement. Instead of using columns of numbers to describe a student's progress, Wireless Generation came up with a visual, a student running from the red area on a bar to the green.
"It's a universal design that both student and teacher can relate to," said Mr. Riza. "They can see a running child advancing along a bar and both understand it as progress."
A year ago, Wireless Generation had 18 designers. Today, it has 37, including six user-experience designers, and is looking for more.