05 Product & interface design
UI/UX Design
Interfaces shaped around the task, not the trend.
What this service covers
Research, flows, and a design system your engineers can build from, so the product stays coherent as it grows past its first release.
We work from the task a person is trying to finish, and design the states that usually get skipped — empty, loading, partial, failed. Those states are where products feel unfinished, and they are cheaper to design than to retrofit.
Design does not stop at handover. We stay alongside engineering through the build, reviewing what ships against what was intended, because that is where the gap between a good file and a good product opens up.
What’s included
- User research
- Wireframing
- Prototyping
- Design systems
- Branding
- Accessibility audits
- Developer handoff
A look at the work
A few builds where this ran as the leading discipline.
Six stages, every engagement
The same delivery sequence runs across all ten services — only what happens inside each stage changes.
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Discover
Who uses this, what they are trying to complete, and where the current interface makes them stop.
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Define
The core flows named and ranked, each with a written condition for what success looks like.
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Design
Wireframes to prototype to a system of components, tested against real content rather than placeholder text.
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Build
We stay with engineering through the build, reviewing what ships against what was designed.
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Launch
An accessibility pass, every state and edge case checked, then components, tokens and specs handed over.
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Scale
The system grows with the product: new surfaces reuse components instead of quietly inventing their own.
Questions we get asked
Can you design without building?
Yes. Plenty of clients bring their own engineering team and need design and a handoff they can work from. You get components, tokens, states, specifications and our availability for questions while your developers build.
Can you improve what we already have, or does that mean a full redesign?
A full redesign is the expensive answer and often the wrong one. We start with a UX audit: the product reviewed against interaction heuristics, accessibility and the tasks people are actually there to complete, with what we find ranked by what it costs users against what it costs to fix. Most audits come back as a short list of changes worth shipping straight away, plus a smaller set of structural problems that genuinely need design work. You decide how far to go with that list in front of you rather than agreeing to a rebuild on principle.
Do you always do user research?
We always do some, sized to the decision. Sometimes that is a handful of conversations with people who already use the product. Sometimes it is a structured study, or watching real users attempt the tasks and recording where they stop. We interview your side too, because the constraints that quietly kill a design are usually internal: what operations can support, what sales has already promised, what the roadmap is committed to. What we avoid is research as ceremony, the kind that produces a report nobody opens again.
What is a design system, and do we need one?
It is a defined set of components with their states, tokens for type, spacing and colour, and written rules for when to use what, all used everywhere instead of redrawn per screen. Whether you need one depends on scale: a single landing page does not, a product with several surfaces and more than one person shipping to it almost certainly does. That is the point where the same button starts existing in four slightly different versions and nobody can say which is correct.
Do you design internal tools and dashboards, or only customer-facing products?
Both, and internal tools are often where the return is largest, because staff sit in them for a full shift and every clumsy step gets paid for again on every record. The design priorities are different from a marketing site: density over whitespace, role clarity so people only see what their job needs, keyboard paths for high-volume entry, and error states that explain what to do next. For dashboards we start from what each audience is meant to decide, then show the figures and filters that serve that decision instead of every number the database can return.
Is accessibility an extra?
No. Contrast, focus order, keyboard paths, labelling and sensible touch targets are part of designing properly, and we work to WCAG practice by default rather than treating it as a phase near the end. A formal accessibility audit against WCAG, with findings documented issue by issue, can be run as its own piece of work when you need evidence for a procurement or compliance requirement, and that is quoted separately.
Can you work inside our existing brand, or build one?
Either. If you have guidelines we design inside them, and extend them where the product needs something they do not cover, which is common: most guidelines were written for marketing and say nothing about disabled states or dense tables. If the brand is the problem, or there is not one yet, that work sits in this service too. Positioning and messaging, naming, the primary mark and its lockups, colour and type systems, motion principles, and guidelines with real examples so your team can apply the brand without asking us every time. We will tell you which of the two you actually need.
What do our developers actually receive?
A component library with every state drawn, design tokens for type, spacing and colour, prototypes for the flows that need motion or sequence explained, exported assets in the formats you build with, and written notes on responsive behaviour and the edge cases. Plus a person to ask, which saves more time than any file format.
Who checks that what shipped matches the design?
We do, as a defined pass rather than a favour. Once the build is on a staging environment we review it against the approved design: spacing, component states, focus behaviour, how it holds up with real content instead of sample data, and the empty, loading and error cases that get skipped when delivery is under pressure. Findings go to whoever is building as a specific list, not as opinions. This is the step that decides whether the product feels finished, and it is the one most often dropped.
Talk to us about UI/UX Design
Tell us what you are trying to ship and who it is for. We come back with a callback slot and the handful of questions we need answered to be useful on the call.