We design product UX, UI, and design systems for ambitious product teams. From user research through to engineering handoff — on the same team, in the same engagement. For SaaS, mobile, and data products across the UK, US, Europe and the Middle East.
Product teams use the product every day. They wrote the copy, they know where the export button is, they walked through onboarding when it had three steps not eight. The users who do not finish onboarding, who give up at the third step of checkout, who bounce at 74% on mobile — those people leave silently. The team builds the next feature instead of fixing the cliff.
A product that looks polished but does not work for users — the onboarding nobody completes, the export button nobody finds, the settings page nobody understands — is the most expensive design failure in the catalogue. The fix is not restyling the interface; it is rebuilding the flows beneath it. That is dramatically cheaper to do correctly the first time than to redesign over a beautiful but broken foundation.
WCAG 2.2 AA is the baseline of credible product work in 2026 — not a "nice to have" added in a final sprint. Retrofitting accessibility onto a product that did not start with it typically costs 4 to 7 times the cost of designing accessibly from the start. The colour-contrast ratios, the focus states, the keyboard navigation, the screen-reader semantics — all need to live inside the design tokens and the component library from day one, not bolted on after legal asks.
Interviews, audits, surveys, usability testing, competitive analysis. The work that makes every design decision downstream defensible — not a guess wearing confidence.
How content and features are organised, how users move from intent to outcome, how decisions branch. The skeleton the visual layer is built on.
Low-fidelity sketches through to interactive prototypes. The artefacts that let the team and the users test decisions before any production-quality design is committed.
High-fidelity product UI, hover and focus states designed deliberately, motion language applied — every screen built in the design tokens and ready for engineering handoff.
Tokens, components with all their states, patterns, and a working documentation site. A real design system the engineering team builds against in code — not a Figma cover page.
Five users watching five tasks before any feature ships. The session recordings, the patterns we see, the changes we make next week. Testing is part of the design process, not a separate engagement.
A design system is not a Figma file. It is the rules and tokens specific to your product, exported into the design tool and the codebase so engineering builds the same thing designers spec. These are the four primitives every system has — and most "Material is our design system" answers are missing.
Six to eight sizes mapped to roles (display, h1, h2, h3, body, small, caption). Every screen picks from the ladder — no one-off type sizes anywhere.
Typically 4 / 8 / 12 / 16 / 24 / 32 / 48 / 64. Every margin, padding, and gap in the product comes from this scale. Removes the "is this 14 or 16?" review forever.
Colour tokens with their accessible-pair partners stamped in. AA at minimum on text — typically AAA for body. The contrast ratio is the design decision, not the colour choice.
Default, hover, focus, active, disabled, loading, error. Every state spec'd in Figma, built in code. Focus rings designed — not browser defaults.
User interviews (typically 5–8 sessions), competitive analysis, audit of the existing product if there is one, stakeholder interviews. Three days to two weeks of intake that produces a written brief — signed off before any design begins.
Personas, key flows, success metrics, the prioritised problem statement. This is the phase where the project actually decides what it is going to ship — before any pixels are drawn. Skipping this phase is the most expensive shortcut in product design.
Wireframes first, then mid-fidelity for flow review, then high-fidelity for visual sign-off. Three rounds of internal critique before any screen is shown to the client team. Every state designed — default, hover, focus, active, disabled, loading, error, empty.
Interactive prototype in Figma or production code. Five-user usability sessions on the prototype before the build starts. The findings shape the final design — testing is part of design, not a separate engagement.
Production-ready screens, component specs, accessibility notes, motion timing, design tokens exported as JSON, and a working handoff session with the engineering team. We stay engaged through build — design review on the implementation, not an over-the-wall handoff.
Six product surfaces from a portfolio of 1,000+ products designed since 2015 — SaaS, mobile, e-commerce, and internal tools.
Six product specimens from a portfolio of 1,000+. If you want to see work from your specific category — SaaS, fintech, marketplace, mobile, data product — ask and we will share more.
Tell us about the product, the team, the metric you need to move. You will get a written recommendation from a senior product designer within 48 hours.
From the web SaaS dashboard to the mobile app in someone's hand to the internal admin tool that operations runs on — all designed in the same system, by the same team.
Working notes from inside our product-design practice — written for founders and product managers making decisions about UX, UI, design systems, and what to commission first.
UX is what the product does for the user. UI is what the product looks like. Hiring one when you need the other is the most expensive mistake in product teams.
Four signs you need one, three signs you don't yet, and the minimum viable system you can ship in 7–9 weeks.
Five UX problems invisible from inside the team, obvious from outside it — with a diagnostic for each you can run this week.
Material was built for Google's products. Tailwind's defaults express Tailwind's opinions. Shadcn is a starting point, not an end state. When you ship a product running on these defaults, you ship the personality of the company that made them — not yours. The product looks competent and unowned.
The components in a UI kit are excellent. The tokens behind them are wrong for your product — colours, type, spacing, contrast — because they were designed for someone else's brand. Ship a product using the components AS-IS and you ship someone else's brand. Re-tokenising on top of a generic kit is a real engagement, not a free upgrade.
Headless primitives (Radix, React Aria, Shadcn) as the technical foundation. Tokens, patterns, and components designed specifically for your product, your users, your engineering team's working style. The kit gives you the speed of standard accessibility primitives; the system on top is yours.
The cost depends on scope — a UX audit is a focused 1–2 week engagement; a full product redesign with design system is a 10–14 week engagement; a discovery research project is 3–4 weeks. There are honest bands for every scope. We share a written estimate within two working days of the discovery call — scope, deliverables, timeline, and team named — before you commit to anything. The most cost-effective starting engagement for an existing product is usually a UX audit, which produces a prioritised fix list cheaper than guessing where to redesign.
A UX audit takes 1–2 weeks. A focused redesign of a single product surface (sign-up, onboarding, checkout) takes 4–6 weeks. A full product redesign with research, design, and handoff takes 10–14 weeks. A minimum viable design system takes 7–9 weeks. A discovery research project takes 3–4 weeks. The phases run sequentially for clarity, but we deliver versioned cuts at each stage so the client team is never waiting on a single big reveal at the end.
UX is what the product does for the user — research, flows, information architecture, decision logic, content design, accessibility. UI is what the product looks like — colour, type, components, visual hierarchy, motion, responsive layouts. They overlap in visual hierarchy, component states, and motion, but the core work is genuinely different. UX is often invisible (research, flows, decisions); UI is always visible (the screens you ship). A well-designed product needs both, in conversation. We wrote a full piece on this — UX vs UI design — in our journal.
Both. Every credible UX engagement starts with research — interviews, audit of the existing product, competitive analysis, usability sessions — and the design work is built on what that research reveals. We can run research as a standalone engagement (3–4 weeks producing a written report, personas, and a prioritised fix list), or as the first phase of a redesign. Skipping research and going straight to design is the single most expensive shortcut in product work; it produces beautiful interfaces that solve the wrong problems.
Both. A focused engagement is one or the other — screens for the immediate product, or a design system for the team’s long-term velocity — but our preferred engagement is both together, because the system gets built around real product needs. A minimum viable design system (tokens, core components, 3–5 patterns, documentation site) takes 7–9 weeks. Adding it to an in-flight product redesign extends the redesign timeline by 3–4 weeks and produces a system that is genuinely owned by the team afterwards.
Accessibility is built into every engagement, not added afterwards. WCAG 2.2 AA is the baseline for every design we ship — proper colour contrast ratios in the token system, focus states designed deliberately on every interactive component, keyboard navigation tested, screen-reader-friendly markup specified in the handoff. AAA is achievable for specific products where the audience requires it; AA is the line we will not ship below. If you need a formal accessibility audit on an existing product, that is a 2–3 week engagement with a written report and prioritised fix list.
Both — and we recommend the former. Design handoff is a 2010s pattern that produces friction; in 2026 our preference is to work alongside your engineering team in the build phase, reviewing implementation, refining interaction states, and adjusting designs based on what the build reveals. Handoff documents are still produced (component specs, accessibility notes, motion timing) but they are the START of the build conversation, not the end of the design one. We can also build a front-end component library directly in code if that’s the more useful artefact for your team.
Across the UK, United States, Ireland, Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, the UAE, and worldwide. Most of our product design work is commissioned by founders, product managers, and design leads at SaaS, fintech, and consumer-product companies — typically Series A through scale-up. We work in your timezone, communicate entirely in English, and have senior product designers available across UK and US business hours. The product itself is designed for the specific market it operates in, with localisation considered from the start where relevant.
Both, and most of our work is the former. Redesigning an existing product means working with constraints — the existing users, the existing data model, the engineering team’s habits, the brand the marketing team uses externally. We start every redesign engagement with a 1–2 week UX audit that produces a candid read on what to keep, what to fix first, and what to defer. The audit alone often pays for itself by preventing teams from redesigning the wrong thing.
A senior product-design freelancer is appropriate when the work is focused — one feature, one flow, one redesign — and one experienced person can hold the whole brief. An agency is appropriate when the work spans research, UX, UI, and design systems together; when multiple stakeholders are involved; when the engagement runs longer than a few months. The rough threshold: if you need both research AND design AND a design system, or if you’ll have more than 6 stakeholders reviewing the work, a small agency band produces a more coherent result than three freelancers handing off to each other.
Book a free 30-minute discovery call. We will ask about the product, the team, the stage you are at (pre-launch, post-launch, scaling, redesigning), and the metric you are trying to move. A written proposal — scope, timeline, team, and price — follows within two working days. The project can usually start within a week of proposal sign-off. The most common starting engagement is a UX audit; the most common follow-on is a redesign plus a minimum viable design system. Book directly from this page or email info@thedreamsteps.com.
Book a free 30-minute consultation. We will look at the product, the team, and the metric you need to move — and tell you honestly which engagement (audit, redesign, design system, or all three) is the right starting point.
What to expect
A direct conversation with Vikas, our founder. No middlemen.