Good UI/UX design pays for itself when it removes friction from the few steps that make you money, such as the enquiry form, the checkout, the sign-up or the main daily task in your software. You don't need to redesign everything. Find where people drop off or get confused, and fix that first.
UI is how a product looks: layout, colour, type and buttons. UX is how it works: whether people can do what they came to do without thinking too hard. A beautiful interface with confusing steps still loses users.
How do you know your product has a UX problem?
- People start a form or checkout and don't finish it
- Support keeps answering the same "how do I" questions
- Staff keep spreadsheets alongside your software because it's easier
- Users ask for features that already exist but can't find them
- Mobile visitors leave much faster than desktop ones
Each of these points at a specific screen or step. That's where design work should start.
What principles make the biggest difference?
- Clarity: every screen should make its main action obvious.
- Fewer steps: ask only for what you need, and only when you need it.
- Consistency: the same things look and behave the same way everywhere.
- Feedback: show what happened after every action, including errors in plain words.
- Accessibility: readable text, enough contrast, and usable by keyboard. WCAG 2.2 is the current W3C standard to design against.
What does a good UI/UX design process look like?
Research
Talk to real users, look at analytics, and watch people use the product. Five short user sessions usually reveal the biggest problems.
Structure and flows
Map what users need to do and in what order, before drawing any screens.
Wireframes and prototypes
Simple layouts first, then a clickable prototype people can try. Changing a prototype is far cheaper than changing finished code.
Visual design
Apply your brand, type and colour, ideally using a design system so the product stays consistent as it grows.
Testing
Test with users again and measure the steps you were trying to improve.
Free consultation
Planning something like this?
Tell us what you need. After a short call we send a written scope, timeline and fixed quote.
Common mistakes
- Designing for how the business is organised instead of how customers think
- Copying a competitor's layout without knowing whether it works for them
- Long forms that ask for everything up front
- Testing only on large desktop screens when most users are on phones
How do you measure whether UX improved?
Decide what you're measuring before you redesign, or you won't know if it worked:
- Completion rate of the key task: enquiry sent, checkout finished, sign-up done
- Where people drop off, from your analytics funnel
- Time to finish common tasks in your software
- Support tickets and "how do I" questions
- Session recordings and heatmaps, using free tools such as Microsoft Clarity alongside Google Analytics
Measure for a few weeks before and after the change. Small, focused fixes are easier to measure than a full redesign.
What drives the cost of UI/UX work?
The number of screens and flows, how much user research you want, whether a design system is included, and how many rounds of testing you run. Redesigning one critical flow costs a fraction of redesigning a whole product.
How Codelix approaches UI/UX
We design in Figma, test with prototypes before development, and build design systems for products that will keep growing. See our UI/UX design and UX research and design systems pages.
