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Baseline Studio

UI design studioEstablished 2017

UI design that survives contact with a real product.

Baseline Studio designs interfaces for mobile and web: the flows, the components, the empty states, and the specifications your engineers can actually build from. A small senior team, three projects at a time.

Start a projectSee the work
Designing product interfaces
9 yrsDesigning product interfaces
Sectors, from transit to dev tools
5Sectors, from transit to dev tools
Concurrent projects, deliberately
3Concurrent projects, deliberately
  • Interface design
  • Design systems
  • Component libraries
  • Design tokens
  • Accessibility audits
  • Interactive prototypes
  • Responsive specs
  • Design to code handover
  • Usability testing
  • Motion specs

01What we do

Four ways to work with the studio

Most engagements start with one of these and grow into another. All of them end with something an engineering team can build without a follow-up meeting.

Full service detail

  • Design audits

    01

    A clear-eyed read of the interface you already have.

    • Screen-by-screen annotated review of every core flow
    • Heuristic findings scored by severity and fix effort
    • WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility findings with the specific failure noted
    2 to 3 weeksDetails

  • UI/UX design

    02

    End-to-end interface design, from first flow to final state.

    • User flows and task maps for every journey in scope
    • Wireframes for structure, agreed before any visual work starts
    • High-fidelity screens at mobile, tablet and desktop widths
    6 to 12 weeksDetails

  • Design systems

    03

    One set of components your designers and engineers both trust.

    • Token architecture in JSON, with platform outputs for web, iOS and Android
    • Figma library with variants and props named to match the code
    • Component specifications covering states, sizes, slots and content rules
    8 to 16 weeksDetails

  • Prototyping

    04

    Something clickable in front of real people, fast.

    • An interactive prototype covering the flows in question, not a slide deck
    • A written test script with the tasks and the questions behind them
    • Five to eight moderated sessions with participants matching your users
    2 to 5 weeksDetails

02Selected work

Interfaces built for the hour after the demo

Six of our recent engagements. Each one describes the problem we walked into, what we changed, and what happened afterwards.

All 9 case studies
Mobile UI2024

Savings goals that survive a bad month

A savings app that treated every missed deposit as a failure, told in red, to people who were already having a difficult month.

VesselRead case study

03How we work

Five stages, in this order, every time

The order matters. Structure gets settled before anything is styled, and nothing ships without being pressure-tested against the build.

  1. 01

    Orient

    We read the product before we redraw it. That means using it properly, sitting with the people who support it, and finding out which screens carry the weight. Most projects reveal their real problem in this first fortnight.

    You get

    • Product teardown
    • Flow inventory
    • Agreed success measures
  2. 02

    Frame

    Before any visual work we agree what each screen has to do and in what order. Structure gets settled in wireframes, where changing your mind costs an hour rather than a week.

    You get

    • User flows
    • Wireframes
    • Scope agreement
  3. 03

    Draw

    High-fidelity interface design, reviewed weekly in the open. No month of silence followed by a reveal. You see the work while it is still cheap to change.

    You get

    • Screen designs
    • Component definitions
    • Responsive behaviour
  4. 04

    Prove

    We put a working prototype in front of people who match your users and watch what happens. Disagreements that cannot be settled in a meeting get settled here instead.

    You get

    • Interactive prototype
    • Test sessions
    • Findings memo
  5. 05

    Ship

    Specs, annotations, states and a live handover with the engineers who will build it. Then we review the build as it lands, because design that is never checked against the running product is a guess.

    You get

    • Redlines and specs
    • Handover session
    • Two build reviews

04What clients say

The reviews we quote are the blunt ones

Four of the people we have worked with, on the part of the engagement they remember.

  • They deleted more of our app than they added, and it is the best thing anyone has done for it. The home screen now answers the question people actually opened it to ask.
    Ilse DraperHead of Digital, Northbound Transit
  • The audit was uncomfortable and completely correct. We had been measuring how much we shipped, not whether anyone used it. Four years of widgets came down to four that matter.
    Priya RamanChief Product Officer, Ledgerline
  • The slide with eleven buttons on it did more for adoption than the library did. Six squads stopped arguing the moment they saw the count.
    Helena FitchGroup Design Director, Meridian Insurance
  • For two years we optimised for the demo. They made us optimise for Tuesday afternoon, which is when our product is actually used.
    Marek SobolDirector of Design, Quarry

05Start a project

Tell us what is not working yet.

Send a few sentences about the product and where it is getting stuck. One of the two studio partners reads every enquiry, and you will hear back within two working days either way.

Start a projectRead the service detail
Current availability
Taking on two engagements for the coming quarter.
Typical reply time
Two working days, from a partner rather than a form.