Build & Design
UI/UX and design
What this category covers
Everything between deciding what to build and handing a developer something unambiguous to build — research with real users, information architecture, wireframes, finished interface design, prototypes, design systems, and the brand identity that sits behind all of it.
The commercial case is straightforward. Other work brings people to you and builds the thing they land on. This work decides whether the people who arrive do something or leave. A company spending a monthly budget on search and paid media, sending ten thousand people to a site, has made one design decision that determines how much of that spend converts — whether the enquiry form has three fields or nine. Design sits closer to revenue than its reputation as a cosmetic discipline suggests.
The other reason it is bought early is timing. Moving something in a design file takes seconds. Moving the same thing in code after the build takes an afternoon. Moving it after launch, with customers, analytics and support tickets attached, takes days and an argument. Every hour spent settling structure before the build is bought back several times over.
Enquiries here tend to arrive in one of three forms. Something is being built and nobody is deciding how it should work. Something already exists, works, and looks old enough that new customers treat the business as smaller than it is. Or a product has grown to the point where every screen is slightly different from every other screen and nobody can say why. Those are three different services, and the first conversation is about which one you actually have.
- Services
- 15
- Detailed pages
- 15
04
UI/UX & Design
15 services
-
01
UX research & user interviews
Talking to real users, then findings and an opportunity map.
-
02
Wireframing & information architecture
Structure and flows first, pixels afterwards.
-
03
Design system / component library
Tokens, components and docs — consistency at scale.
-
04
High-fidelity product design
The finished visual design of a whole app or site, in Figma.
-
05
Interactive prototype
A clickable demo for pitching and for user testing.
-
06
Design-to-code handoff
Figma turned into pixel-accurate responsive code.
-
07
Brand identity & logo
Logo, colour, type and usage — the core of a brand.
-
08
Brand guidelines / style guide
The rules document a team and its vendors can actually follow.
-
09
Pitch deck & presentation design
An investor or sales deck — narrative first, then visuals.
-
10
Packaging & print design
Boxes, labels and brochures, delivered print-ready.
-
11
Social media creative kit
Templates, post sets and reel covers, consistent with the brand.
-
12
Illustration & custom iconography
Custom art and icon sets that make a brand distinguishable.
-
13
Motion design & micro-interactions
Animated logos, interface transitions and loaders.
-
14
Conversion rate optimisation audit
Heatmaps, funnels and friction points, with the fixes ranked.
-
15
A/B testing programme
Hypotheses, tests and statistically valid results, month by month.
How the work runs.
-
01
Scope
What you actually need from UI/UX & Design, written as deliverables rather than adjectives.
A day or two
-
02
Price and date
A fixed scope, a number and a delivery date, agreed before anyone starts.
Same week
-
03
Build
The work itself, with something you can open and look at rather than a status report.
The bulk of it
-
04
Handover
Files, access and a walkthrough. Nothing is held hostage.
Final day
See where the site stands before you brief anyone.
Before scoping UI/UX & Design work, it helps to know what the site is doing today. The audit reports what it checked, what it found, and — the part most tools leave out — what it could not check, and why.
Questions people ask before they commit.
- What is the difference between UX and UI, in practical terms?
- UX is whether the person got the thing done — how many steps it took, where they hesitated, where they gave up. UI is what they looked at while doing it, which is size, weight, colour, spacing and position. You need both and they fail differently. Good UX with poor UI works but is not trusted, which shows up as abandoned forms and unanswered enquiries. Attractive UI with poor UX demos beautifully and makes people angry within a week.
- Where should we start if we are not sure what we need?
- With structure, almost always. Sitemap, flows and wireframes are the cheapest stage to change and the one everything else is built on, and it is where the arguments that would otherwise surface as taste disputes get settled early. If you already have a product and the question is why people are not converting, start instead with research or a conversion audit, because designing before you know what is failing is guesswork with an invoice attached.
- Do you promise this will increase our conversion rate?
- No. Nobody honestly can, and a supplier who does is telling you what you want to hear. What we will say is that we will fix the specific problems visible in the recordings, the flow and the interface, and that we will agree in advance how the result gets measured and when. A commitment to method is worth something. A commitment to a number that depends on your pricing, your market and your traffic is worth nothing.
- How much of this can AI do now?
- Less than in most categories, and the reason is specific. AI will produce a hundred plausible layouts in minutes. Deciding which of the hundred is right requires noticing what is wrong with the other ninety-nine, and that judgement is the service. Where it genuinely earns its place is interface writing, transcript analysis in research, documentation, and comparing a build against a design — all of which we use it for and say so.
- Can you work with our existing designer or development team?
- Yes, and much of this category is bought that way. A design system for your own product team, wireframes handed to your own designer, a Figma file turned into code for an agency, research delivered to a product manager who will act on it. Deliverables are built to be picked up by whoever is continuing — named styles, real components, written documentation and a handover session rather than a file dropped over a wall.
- What is the most expensive mistake in this category?
- Starting with appearance. When visual design begins before the structure is agreed, every structural problem arrives later disguised as a preference, and preferences cannot be resolved with evidence. Projects in that state go round three or four rounds and get more expensive each time. The second most expensive is designing only for the state where everything is going well, and discovering the rest when real data arrives.