Our Services
UI/UX Design Services
Design decides whether software gets used. A product can be technically excellent and commercially doomed because signing up takes eleven steps, because the important action is buried three levels deep, or because an error message tells the user something went wrong without telling them what to do about it. These are not aesthetic problems, and repainting the interface does not fix them.
Atisolve designs interfaces for web and mobile applications: research, information architecture, interaction design, visual design and design systems. We work on new products where nothing exists yet, and on established products where usage data suggests something is wrong but nobody is sure what. In both cases the work starts with understanding the task the user is trying to complete, because everything else follows from that.
The Difference Between UX and UI
The terms are used interchangeably and they should not be. User experience is about structure and behaviour: what the product does, how it is organised, what sequence a task follows, what happens when something fails. User interface is about the surface: layout, typography, colour, spacing, iconography and motion.
Both matter, but they fail differently. Poor UI makes a product look unprofessional and erodes trust. Poor UX makes it unusable regardless of how it looks. A beautifully rendered interface over a confused structure produces the specific frustration of a product that appears competent and then wastes your time. We treat the structural work as the foundation and the visual work as what makes it feel considered.
What We Do
User Research
Interviews, usability testing and analysis of existing behaviour to establish what users actually do rather than what stakeholders believe they do.
Information Architecture
Organising content and functionality so people can find things, and so navigation reflects how users think about the domain rather than the internal org chart.
Wireframing and Prototyping
Working through structure and flow cheaply, before visual design and long before code, when changes cost hours rather than weeks.
Visual Design
Typography, colour, spacing and hierarchy applied consistently so the interface guides attention rather than competing for it.
Design Systems
Reusable component libraries with documented rules, so a growing product stays coherent and developers stop reinventing the same button.
Accessibility
Designing so the product works for people using screen readers, keyboard navigation, magnification or with limited colour perception.
Our Design Process
Understanding Users and Goals
We establish who uses the product, what they are trying to accomplish and what currently obstructs them. Where users are accessible we speak to them; where they are not, we work from support tickets, analytics and the experience of the people who deal with users daily. Support queues are an underrated research source — they are a continuous record of where a product fails.
Auditing What Exists
For an existing product we map the current flows and identify where users drop out, where they hesitate, and where they contact support. Analytics tell us where the problem is; usability observation tells us why. Both are needed — data without observation leads to confident misdiagnosis.
Structuring the Experience
We define information architecture and key flows before any visual work. This is where the important decisions are made: how many steps a task requires, what is shown by default and what is hidden, how the product handles the awkward cases. Getting this right is worth more than any amount of visual refinement applied later.
Prototyping and Testing
We build interactive prototypes and put them in front of people before committing to development. Watching someone struggle with a prototype for ten minutes reveals more than a fortnight of internal discussion, and fixing it at that stage costs almost nothing.
Visual Design and System
We apply visual design as a system rather than screen by screen — type scale, spacing scale, colour roles, component states — so that the product remains consistent as it grows and so developers have unambiguous rules to build against.
Handover and Support
We deliver specifications developers can build from without guessing: spacing, states, responsive behaviour and edge cases. We stay involved during implementation, because questions always arise that no static file anticipated.
Design Decisions That Determine Whether a Product Works
Onboarding and First Use
The first session determines whether there is a second. Most products lose the majority of new users before they reach the point where the product demonstrates its value. The usual causes are asking for too much before showing anything, explaining features rather than helping the user achieve something, and presenting an empty interface with no indication of what to do first. We design onboarding around getting a user to a first meaningful outcome quickly, deferring everything that can wait.
Empty, Loading and Error States
These three states are where most design effort is missing and where most user frustration is generated. An empty state is the first thing a new user sees and should explain what goes here and how to add it. A loading state should indicate progress rather than freezing. An error should say what went wrong in plain language, and what the user can do next. Designing only the state where everything has gone right produces an interface that abandons people at precisely the moments they need help.
Forms
Forms are where users abandon. Every field is a point of friction and every unclear label is a point of hesitation. We reduce fields to what is genuinely needed at that moment, validate inline rather than failing everything on submit, preserve entered data when something goes wrong, and write labels and error messages in language that tells people what to do rather than what the validator objected to. Long forms are broken into steps with visible progress, because a form of unknown length invites abandonment.
Mobile and Responsive Behaviour
Responsive design is frequently treated as making a desktop layout narrower. It is really about what matters most when space is constrained, how touch targets differ from cursor targets, and how a data table behaves when it cannot fit. We design the constrained case deliberately rather than deriving it by reduction, because the small screen is where most people will encounter the product.
Accessibility as a Design Requirement
Accessible design means people with disabilities can use the product. That includes users of screen readers, people navigating by keyboard because a mouse is impractical, people who magnify text substantially, and people who cannot distinguish certain colours. In many jurisdictions there are legal obligations attached, and in enterprise procurement accessibility conformance is increasingly a purchasing requirement.
The practical measures are not onerous when applied from the start: sufficient colour contrast, never using colour alone to convey meaning, visible focus indicators, labelled form fields, meaningful alternative text, heading structures that reflect actual hierarchy, and interactive elements that work with a keyboard. Retrofitting these into a finished product is considerably more expensive than designing with them, which is the main argument for treating accessibility as a requirement rather than an enhancement.
Design Systems and Consistency
Products drift. A button gets a slightly different shade on a new screen, a spacing value is chosen by eye, a fourth variant of a card appears. Individually these are trivial; cumulatively they make a product feel unconsidered and make development slower, because every screen becomes a fresh decision.
A design system fixes this by defining components once with documented rules for when and how to use them. The benefit is as much about development speed as visual consistency — a developer building a screen from established components moves faster and produces fewer inconsistencies than one interpreting a static mockup. We build systems proportionate to the product; a small application does not need the apparatus appropriate to a large one.
Designing With Real Data
Interfaces designed against tidy placeholder content tend to break on contact with reality. Names are longer than expected, product titles wrap to three lines, a list that looked elegant with six items becomes unusable at six hundred, and a dashboard designed around encouraging numbers looks quite different when a metric is negative. These are not edge cases; they are the ordinary condition of a live product.
We design against representative content from the outset — real lengths, real volumes, real awkward values — and specify how components behave when content exceeds the space available. That means deciding deliberately whether text truncates, wraps or scrolls, how tables behave on narrow screens, and what a list does when it grows beyond a comfortable length. Making these decisions during design rather than leaving them to be resolved during implementation is what prevents the gap between the approved mockup and the shipped screen.
Tools and Deliverables
- Research findings — what we learned, from whom, and what it implies for the design, stated plainly rather than as a deck of quotations.
- Flows and architecture — how the product is organised and how key tasks proceed, including the failure paths.
- Interactive prototypes — clickable enough to test with real users before development begins.
- Visual designs — screens with defined states, responsive behaviour and specification detail developers can build from.
- Design system — component library with usage rules, maintained in Figma and mirrored in code where we also build the front end.
- Accessibility notes — contrast checks, focus order, keyboard behaviour and screen reader considerations documented alongside the designs.
Starting a Project
For an existing product, an audit is the most useful starting point — it is bounded, it tells you where the actual problems are before you commit to a larger engagement, and it frequently identifies a handful of changes worth making immediately. For a new product, the place to begin is the core task the product exists to support, because everything else in the interface is subordinate to it. Get in touch and describe what you are building or what is not working, and we will tell you what we think the real problem is, including when we think the issue is not a design problem at all.
Frequently Asked Questions
We already have a product. Do we need a full redesign?
Usually not. Complete redesigns are expensive, risky and often unpopular with existing users who have learned the current interface. More often a targeted audit identifies a small number of specific problems — a checkout step causing abandonment, a navigation structure people cannot parse — where focused changes produce most of the available benefit.
How do you measure whether design worked?
Against behaviour, not opinion. Completion rates for key tasks, time to first meaningful action, drop-off at specific steps, support ticket volume in the affected area, and error rates on forms. We establish baselines before changing anything so the comparison means something.
Do you work with our developers?
Yes, and closely. Design handed over as static files without ongoing involvement reliably produces implementations that diverge from intent, not through carelessness but because real implementation raises questions the files did not answer. We stay available through the build and review the result.
Can you design without doing research?
We can, and sometimes budget or timeline requires it. It is a real trade-off: without research we are applying general principles and professional judgement rather than evidence about your specific users. That is often better than nothing, but it is guesswork with expertise attached, and we will describe it as such rather than implying more certainty than exists.
How much does design cost relative to development?
It is typically a modest fraction of build cost, and it reduces build cost by resolving questions before they become code. Changing a flow in a prototype takes an afternoon; changing it after implementation takes considerably longer and often introduces defects. Design is among the cheaper points at which to be wrong.
Will you follow our existing brand guidelines?
Yes. Brand guidelines usually cover logo, colour and typography but rarely address interface specifics such as component states, form behaviour or data density. We work within the brand and extend it where the guidelines are silent, documenting those extensions so the product stays coherent as it grows.
How many users do we need to test with?
Fewer than most people assume. Five or six participants typically surface the majority of significant usability problems for a given task, because serious problems affect nearly everyone who attempts it. Larger samples are needed for measuring differences between designs, not for finding faults. Testing with a handful of people is dramatically better than testing with none.
Should we design for mobile or desktop first?
Design for whichever your users predominantly use, but resolve the constrained case deliberately either way. Starting on mobile forces prioritisation because there is no room for everything, which usually improves the desktop version too. Starting on desktop and reducing tends to produce a mobile experience that feels like an afterthought, because it is one.
Can you design a dark mode?
Yes, though it is more involved than inverting the palette. Contrast relationships change, shadows stop conveying elevation, and colours that read well on white can vibrate on dark backgrounds. It is best planned as part of the design system with colour defined by role rather than by value, which makes supporting both themes a matter of swapping tokens.
What if stakeholders disagree about the design?
Disagreement usually signals that the underlying goals were never made explicit, so preferences fill the gap. We resolve it by returning to what the design is meant to achieve and, where possible, testing with actual users. A recorded session of someone struggling with a flow settles debates that hours of internal discussion will not.
Have a vision? Let’s bring it to life.
Whether it’s an app, website, or platform—your idea deserves expert execution. Let us help you build it from the ground up with clarity, care, and speed.
Gallery
Subscribe
Get a sneak peek into our latest developments
