Engineering
UI/UX Design
Research-driven product design for complex enterprise software — where a design that saves each user forty seconds saves the organization thousands of hours.
Overview
Why it matters
Enterprise software has a design debt problem: systems assembled feature by feature over a decade, each addition locally reasonable, the whole increasingly hostile. The costs are quantifiable — training weeks that should be days, error rates that become rework, expert users building spreadsheet workarounds, and software your own staff describes as the worst part of their job. Consumer-grade expectations have arrived at work, and they are not negotiable anymore.
Our design practice is built for that complexity. We design trading consoles, claims workbenches, clinical tools, and operations platforms — software where users are experts, sessions last hours, information density is a feature, and a confusing state can cost real money. That demands a different discipline than marketing-site design: contextual research with the people who do the work, task and workflow modeling before any pixels, and usability measured with completion rates and time-on-task, not stakeholder applause.
We work as an integrated discipline with engineering, not a handoff upstream of it. Deliverables are engineered artifacts: design systems as coded component libraries, specifications with states and edge cases enumerated, accessibility annotated at the component level, and design QA through implementation. Design that ships is the only design that counts.
Business challenges
The problems this practice exists to solve
Complexity that buries the work
Twelve screens and forty clicks for a task experts perform fifty times a day. The system exposes its database schema instead of the user's workflow — and every click is multiplied by headcount.
Training as a symptom
Three weeks of onboarding, thick manuals, and a permanent stream of how-do-I tickets are not a training problem. They are the interface billing its confusion to your operation.
Inconsistency compounding across an estate
Every module its own conventions — different tables, different forms, different meanings for the same icon. Users pay a relearning tax at every boundary; every team rebuilds what another already built.
Redesigns that skip the research
A visual refresh shipped without touching the workflow — prettier screens, same forty clicks. Without contextual research, redesigns reliably repaint the wrong thing.
Our solution
How we engineer it
We start in the field, not in Figma. Contextual inquiry — watching real users do real work in their real environment — surfaces the workarounds, mental models, and exception cases that interviews and analytics miss. We synthesize that into task models and journey maps that make the current cost of bad design explicit, and we align stakeholders on measurable targets: task time, error rate, first-week proficiency, System Usability Scale scores.
Design then proceeds from structure to surface. Information architecture and workflow design fix the forty-click problem before visual design makes anything prettier; dense-data patterns — tables built for scanning, progressive disclosure, keyboard-first interaction for expert users — are prototyped and usability-tested with the actual user population, iterating until measured task performance clears the target. Aesthetics matter (trust is visual), but they are the final layer, not the first.
Everything lands in a design system built for enterprise scale: tokens, accessible components, dense-data patterns, and documentation — delivered as coded libraries co-owned with engineering, with governance so it stays coherent as teams adopt it. Accessibility (WCAG 2.2 AA) is built into components once and inherited everywhere. The system turns design quality from a project outcome into an organizational capability.
Capabilities
What ui/ux design covers
User research & contextual inquiry
Field observation, expert-user interviews, workflow shadowing, and analytics triangulation — the evidence base that separates redesign from repainting.
UX for complex workflows
Information architecture, task-flow redesign, and dense-data interaction patterns for consoles, workbenches, and operations tools used hours per day by experts.
Enterprise design systems
Token-based, WCAG-compliant component systems delivered as coded libraries with documentation and governance — one design language across your product estate.
Usability testing & validation
Moderated and unmoderated testing with your real user population, measured on completion, time-on-task, and error rates — design decisions settled by evidence.
Accessibility & inclusive design
WCAG 2.2 AA baked into components and patterns, assistive-technology testing, and conformance documentation — compliance as a by-product of good design.
DesignOps & team enablement
Figma architecture, design-to-code workflows, contribution models, and coaching that leave your internal teams operating the system after we're gone.
Technology stack
Tools we deploy to production every week
Pragmatic about tools, opinionated about architecture — the platforms below are the ones this practice ships with, chosen per engagement on evidence.
Design & Prototyping
- Figma
- FigJam
- ProtoPie
- Principle
Research & Testing
- Maze
- Lookback
- Dovetail
- Hotjar
- UserTesting
Design Systems
- Figma Variables / Tokens
- Storybook
- Radix UI
- Tailwind CSS
- Chromatic
Accessibility
- axe DevTools
- Stark
- NVDA / VoiceOver testing
Implementation process
Five stages. No surprises.
A delivery model refined over 250+ engagements — sequenced so leadership gets visibility and your teams get momentum.
Research & diagnosis
Contextual inquiry with real users, workflow and pain-point mapping, and baseline measurement of task time, errors, and satisfaction — so improvement is provable later.
Structure & strategy
Information architecture, task-flow redesign, and priority decisions made with stakeholders against the evidence — the deep fixes that visual polish alone can't deliver.
Design & prototype
From wireframes to high-fidelity prototypes built on the design system, with states, edge cases, and accessibility annotated — realistic enough to test honestly.
Test & iterate
Usability testing with the actual user population against the baseline metrics; iterate until task performance clears the agreed targets, not until the room nods.
Ship & systematize
Design QA through implementation, coded component delivery with engineering, and design-system governance so quality compounds across the next ten projects.
Use cases
Where enterprises apply it
Operations workbench redesign
Claims, underwriting, dispatch, and case-management consoles restructured around the operator's workflow — measured in minutes saved per case.
Design system for a product estate
One token-based system unifying a dozen products built by different teams in different eras — with a coded library and adoption roadmap.
Legacy modernization UX
The design workstream of a replatforming: preserving expert users' hard-won efficiency while removing the hostility, validated before engineering commits.
Data-dense dashboard & analytics UX
Decision-oriented dashboards designed around the questions users ask — not around whatever charts the data warehouse could produce.
Customer portal & onboarding design
Self-service journeys designed and tested for completion without support calls — the design layer of call-deflection economics.
Accessibility remediation program
Systematic WCAG 2.2 AA remediation across an estate, sequenced by user impact and legal exposure, fixed at the component level so it stays fixed.
Outcomes
Results clients report to their boards
58%
reduction in average task completion time on a redesigned claims workbench
72
System Usability Scale score, up from 41 — from the 'poor' to the 'excellent' band
64%
fewer UI-related support tickets in the quarter after relaunch
3 days
new-hire time-to-proficiency, down from three weeks
FAQs
Questions leaders ask us
Direct answers on ui/ux design — the same ones we give in the first consultation.
Related services
Practices that pair with this one
Ready to put ui/ux design to work?
In a 45-minute consultation, our architects map your highest-ROI opportunity, outline a delivery plan, and give you a realistic budget range — no obligation.