UX/UI

What These Agencies Do

UX/UI agencies design how software and complex websites actually work for the people using them. The UX side is research and structure: interviewing users, mapping the steps in a task, testing prototypes, and finding where people get stuck or give up. The UI side is the interface itself, screens, components, and design systems that developers build from. The output is typically a tested prototype and a set of specifications, not a finished coded product, though some firms in this category also build.

In the Midwest these agencies mostly serve software companies, healthcare and financial firms, and established businesses with internal tools that employees struggle to use. That last group is underserved and worth naming: a dispatch screen, an ordering portal, or a quoting tool that wastes staff time every day is a UX problem with a measurable cost. This is a different discipline from marketing web design, and it is priced differently because research time is a large share of the work.

When to Hire One

UX engagements pay for themselves when a specific, observable problem is costing you money. Reasonable triggers:

• Users start a signup, checkout, or application flow and abandon it at a known step
• Your software product gets consistent complaints that it is confusing or hard to learn
• An internal tool requires extensive training or workarounds for staff to do basic tasks
• You are building a new product and want the flows tested before developers write code
• Support tickets cluster around the same few screens or tasks

What to Ask Before You Sign

UX work is often scoped in phases, a research and audit phase first, then design, and small focused engagements can sit in the four figures while full product design projects commonly run into five figures. Because the deliverables are less familiar than a website, be precise about what you will receive and how success is judged.

• What exactly will I receive, research findings, prototypes, final screens, a design system, and in what tool?
• Will you test with real users, how many, and who recruits them?
• Can we start with a paid audit of the current product before committing to a full engagement?
• How will we measure whether the redesign worked, task completion, support volume, conversion?
• How will you hand off to my developers, and are you available during the build to answer questions?
• Have you worked in my industry, and can I see the before and after of a comparable project?