UX and UI design
Interfaces people understand the first time
UX research, information architecture, user flows, interface design and a design system your developers and AI tools can build from. Designed by people who also build software, so what you approve is what ships.
Send a link and the one task users struggle with most. That single flow is usually where the first improvement pays for the project.
- How it starts
- A written brief or a file you already have, then a call. Both free.
- Who does the work
- Nikola, plus a named collaborator where the work needs one: named before they start, never a bench.
- What you get
- Artifacts you own and can hand to any team, including one that is not us.
- Payment
- Split across agreed milestones. Nothing hourly by surprise.
How a project works
What users actually run into
Users rarely complain about design. They just leave.
Bad UX shows up as support tickets, abandoned signups and features nobody finds, long before anyone calls it a design problem.
- Onboarding that loses people
- Too many fields, too early, with no sense of what happens next. Most products lose more users in the first five minutes than in the next five months.
- Navigation that mirrors the org chart
- Menus arranged the way the company thinks, not the way users look for things.
- Every screen a little different
- Buttons, spacing and wording drift because there is no design system, so the product feels unreliable even when it works.
- Forgotten states
- Empty, loading, error and permission states nobody designed, so users meet a blank screen at exactly the wrong moment.
- Inaccessible by accident
- Low contrast, tiny targets and missing labels that shut out users and create legal exposure for no benefit.
- A Figma file the code ignores
- Designs handed over as pictures and rebuilt by guesswork. Six months later the product and the file disagree.
What you get
Research, flows, screens and the system behind them
Everything is delivered as working files your team owns, and as tokens and components when you want the design built into code.
- UX audit of the current product, with problems ranked by how much they cost you
- User research: interviews, usability tests on real tasks, and a written summary of findings
- Information architecture and navigation built around how users look for things
- User flows for every key task, including empty, loading, error and permission states
- Wireframes and clickable prototypes, tested before anything is built
- High-fidelity UI for web and mobile, light and dark
- A design system: tokens, components and usage rules in Figma and in code
- Accessibility to WCAG 2.2 AA: contrast, focus, labels and keyboard use checked
- Design QA on the built product, so what ships matches what was approved
How it runs
Find the friction, fix it, then make it systematic
01
Audit
We go through the product as a new user would and review whatever data you have on where people drop off.
02
Research
Short interviews and usability tests on the tasks that matter. Real users, real tasks, recorded findings.
03
Flows first
We fix the structure before the pixels: what happens, in what order, and what the user sees when something goes wrong.
04
Design
Interfaces designed against the flows, reviewed with you on your real content, not lorem ipsum.
05
Test
A clickable prototype in front of users before engineering time is spent.
06
Build it in
Tokens and components delivered in code, and design QA on what ships.
When this is the wrong thing to buy
- The product does not yet know who it is for. Then you need product management first, and design will follow from it.
- You want a visual refresh only. We will improve how it looks, but we will also point at the flows that cost you users.
- Nobody can implement the design. We can build it, but a design with no one to build it is a picture.
- You need a marketing website only. Our brand and marketing pages cover that better.
Why take this from us
We design products we then have to maintain
Every product in our portfolio was designed by the same team that built it and kept it running, so our designs have to survive real data, real edge cases and years of new features. That is a different standard from a design that only has to survive a presentation.
- 50+
- products this team has designed, built and shipped
- AA
- WCAG contrast and accessibility, checked on every screen
- 4
- states designed for every screen: empty, loading, error, done
- $300–400
- per hour for project work, priced after the call
Questions
UX/UI design, in detail
- What is the difference between UX and UI design?
- UX design is how the product works: the structure, the flows, what happens in each situation and how easy a task is to finish. UI design is how it looks and feels: layout, type, color, components and motion. Good UI on a bad flow only makes the problem look nicer, so we always start with UX.
- Can you redesign part of the product instead of all of it?
- Yes, and it is often the smarter start. One critical flow, such as onboarding or checkout, redesigned and measured, tells you whether the rest is worth doing.
- Do you design for web and mobile?
- Both, with one design system shared between them so the product feels like one product on every device.
- Will our developers be able to use the designs?
- That is the point. We deliver tokens and components, specify every state, and review what gets built. If you use AI coding tools, the design system is exactly the input that makes their output match your product.
- How much does it cost?
- Project work is $300–$400 an hour with a 10 hours minimum. After the first call you get a written scope and a fixed number for it. Ongoing design work runs on the same rate card as our monthly arrangements.
- How long does it take?
- A UX audit with a prioritized list takes one to two weeks. A redesign of one key flow takes three to five weeks. A full product redesign with a design system usually takes two to four months.
Related
Product management
Deciding what to build before designing it.
Brand design
The identity the interface is built on.
Product design consulting
Design decisions every month.
Product & system design
A full blueprint before a new build.
Web platforms
Building the interface once it is designed.
The products we build
Over 50 products designed and shipped.
Send it over
Show us the product
A link, screenshots or a Figma file, and the task users find hardest. Add any data you have: drop-off numbers, support tickets, survey answers.
We reply with the first problems we see and what a sensible first project would be.
