UX / UI Design

You can do UX design without being a skilled visual artist, but not UI. On the other hand, you can do UI design without knowing about user psychology, but not UX. At least in theory. In practice, whenever you meet someone with UX or UI design as their job title, they will most likely be skilled at both psychology and visual arts.

Both of these skill sets are crucially important for designers working on modern digital products. But, there are also soft skills, like creativity, boldness, cooperation and compromise. The best UX and UI designers always strive to build the greatest experience and interface for any particular project. But, in the course of their work, they need to make many trade-offs between their vision and the actual technological requirements of the product.

There are plenty of situations where it’s absolutely fine to have juniors design the user experience and / or interface of your product:

• In low-risk, low-effort projects like run-of-the-mill websites or basic apps. 
• At early, MVP or PoC stages of your project. 
• When UX and UI are low-priority considerations. For example, if you’re building server management tools for admins, you usually don’t need any interface at all. Sometimes strict standards make it impossible to be creative with your UX or UI. 

Apart from the above situations, you probably don’t want juniors handling your UX and UI design. In our team there are only senior designers, because we believe that proper UX and UI design is a big contribution to the success of your project.

There are plenty of ready-made templates and libraries for structuring the software experience and creating sleek, modern interfaces. A lot of them are free and open-source. Why would you even bother with designers?

If you don’t care about being competitive in the market, then you’re right, you can probably just rely on templates. Or maybe you’re building an internal tool that will only be used by a few people? Probably don’t need to overspend on design there, either.

So, there are situations where UX and UI don’t contribute much to the success of your project. However, if you plan to:

• Scale up, 
• Keep attracting new users,
• Retain existing users,
• Compete with alternative products, 

...then UX and UI design become yet another ring in which you fight for your market position. You compete with functionality, performance, brand, marketing, sales, why not compete with innovative UX and UI? 

Viewed from this perspective, UX and UI design becomes an integral part of the product life cycle. It’s not enough to design once and never change things. Unless you’re YC founder Paul Graham, and you don’t care that your website looks like a relic of the ancient internet (it doesn’t even have SSL, Paul, what the heck?). But you’re probably not Paul Graham, so you can’t rely on the fact that people will go to your website or app regardless of what it looks like, and what it feels like to use it. 

One of the key aspects of UX and UI is data. Obviously, when you’re starting out, you have no usage data to base your decisions on, so you rely on design principles and best practices. Over time, as you collect and store more data, you can analyze it and look for usage patterns.  

These usage patterns are the best fuel to power your UX and UI design process. Your users are literally showing you what they don’t like about your software through the way that they use it.

Do you do UX / UI design before development, during, or after the product has acquired a big enough user base? As we mentioned before, this is something that, ideally, you do throughout the product life cycle.

However, regardless of what stage your project is at, our team can enter and take care of UX and UI design, along with any other needs you might have. We know that sometimes investing in design early on isn’t viable, and that investment might come later, when the product has proven to be viable (for example, this often happens in FinTech).

So, if at any stage of your project you need pristine UX and UI design - you can count on us to help.