UI/UX Design

Most interface work goes wrong before anyone draws a rectangle. The brief arrives describing screens — a dashboard, a settings page, a checkout — when what the product owes the person using it is a job finished in as few decisions as possible.

The order we work in

Find the jobs. Not personas, not a feature list. The two or three things somebody opens the product to get done, and what it costs them when it takes too long.

Draw the flow before the screen. Most bad screens are a good screen in the wrong place. A flow on one page shows the step that should not exist, and deleting it is cheaper here than anywhere further down.

Design the states, not the happy path. Empty, loading, one row, four hundred rows, the error, the thing this user is not allowed to see. A design that only shows the full and correct case is a design that gets improvised during the build.

Then make it a system. Components with their states and the rules behind spacing, type and colour — so the tenth screen is assembled rather than invented, and it still matches the first.

Handover is part of the design

A design a developer has to interpret ships as something else. Ours arrives with the components named, the states drawn and the decisions written down, and we stay reachable while it is built — because the questions that come up during the build are the ones that were never going to be answered by looking at a picture.

Design that has to be measured

Where a redesign is meant to change a number, we agree the number and how it is read before any of it changes. Otherwise the only available verdict on new work is whether the people who commissioned it like looking at it.