UX/UI Design.

Step one is understanding, not drawing. Who are the users, what task do they arrive with, under what conditions do they complete it? That does not require a large study: five to eight conversations with real customers, a look at the pages with the highest drop-off, and the questions the business already answers on the phone every day. Those questions are the most reliable source for the structure of a website.

Step two is structure. What content exists, how is it grouped, and what are the menu items called in the users' language rather than the org chart's? From this come user flows for the two or three tasks the product is genuinely measured on — for an SME usually understand the offer, build trust, get in touch.

Step three is wireframes: deliberately grey, unstyled drafts. Dropping colour is intentional. As long as nothing is pretty, everyone argues about order, scope and clarity instead of taste. A change costs minutes at this stage; the same change after development costs days.

Step four is the UI design and the clickable prototype, usually in Figma. What matters is that the prototype shows more than the happy path: loading states, validation errors, empty lists, very long product names. States discovered only during development are not designed — they are improvised.

Step five is testing. Five test participants uncover roughly 85 percent of the observable usability problems in a prototype, according to Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman Group, based on Nielsen and Landauer (1993). That figure covers problems you find by watching people, not questions of taste or market acceptance. It is still the reason a five-person test almost always beats another internal review round.

Step six is handover. A design system keeps colours, typography, spacing and components in one place so the twentieth screen still looks like the first. Without one, every project drifts as soon as more than one person works on it.

An example we can disclose because it sits on this domain: the most common question before a web project is what it will cost. The usual agency answer is a contact form — hand in your question and wait for a call back. Convenient for the agency, and the drop-off point for the user.

The UX decision was to answer the question before the form rather than after it. That became the project calculator: a few inputs on scope, number of pages and features, and a range at the end before any address is entered.

The UI decisions are the layer above and just as decisive here: one step per screen instead of one long form; visible progress so it is clear how much is left; large answer targets reachable with a thumb on a phone; and a result stated as a range rather than false precision — a number nobody believes helps nobody.

The point of the example is not the tool. The point is the order: first the users' question was identified, then the flow was built, then the surface was designed. The other way round produces a pretty form that still leaves the question unanswered.

In large organisations the roles are separate. A UX designer or researcher works on research, information architecture, flows and testing. A UI designer works on visual language, component library and the accessibility of the surface. An interaction designer handles motion and feedback, a content designer the words in the interface — labels, error messages, empty states. They sound like details and frequently decide between abandonment and completion.

In Swiss SME projects these roles are almost never separate. One person does what four people do in a corporation — which is fine, as long as the order holds and the testing does not get skipped. Product designer is today's usual umbrella term for exactly that profile.

One distinction matters: a design team is not a development team, and a Figma prototype is not a website. Between the finished design and the working product sits implementation — and that is where design is most often lost when design and development are bought separately. What that handover looks like on a web project is described under web design Zurich.

This page is written by an agency and describes the discipline from a client's point of view. Anyone researching careers, education or salaries is better served by universities, professional bodies and the Nielsen Norman Group — we do not train designers and have nothing verifiable to say about it.

The W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), version 2.2, are the usual reference point. For day-to-day design work they mean four things above all: sufficient colour contrast between text and background, every function reachable by keyboard, a visible focus ring, and form fields with real labels rather than placeholder text only.

These four are not special equipment for a small group. Contrast helps anyone looking at a phone outdoors; keyboard operability helps anyone working fast; real labels help anyone returning to a form after an interruption. More under digital accessibility.

Legally the Swiss picture is layered: binding requirements apply first to federal bodies and public administration. Companies selling products or services into the EU market, however, fall under the European Accessibility Act, which has applied since 28 June 2025. For a Swiss company with EU customers, accessibility is therefore no longer purely a question of style. Have the specific case assessed by a lawyer — we deliver the technical and design implementation, not legal advice.

At DLM Digital a UX audit of an existing site starts at CHF 1,500. A UX/UI design sprint for a defined area — a landing page, a sign-up flow, a configurator — starts at CHF 6,000. A full product design with research, design system and testing starts at CHF 15,000. A complete website including implementation ranges from CHF 3,000 to CHF 25,000 depending on scope; a validated prototype for a new digital product starts at CHF 10,000.

And now the part agencies rarely write: there are cases where a dedicated UX project is the wrong spend. If you need a five-page company website with a contact form and your offer explains itself in one sentence, a UX process with research and test rounds is over-specified. Take a properly built standard layout, put the difference into text and photography, and get real value out of it.

Also the wrong order: a redesign while nobody knows why visitors leave. Redesigning without data swaps one untested design for another and leaves you with a new opinion. Start with analytics, a handful of user conversations and an audit; that costs a fraction and tells you whether a redesign is the problem at all.

And a third case: if the real weakness sits in the offer, the price or the sales process, no interface fixes it. A better form does not sell a product nobody wants. We would rather say that in the first conversation than after the third invoice.

Useful measures are: task success rate (how many test participants complete the task unaided), time to goal, the drop-off rate at every single step of a flow, the number of support requests about a particular screen, and the conversion rate over a period long enough not to be noise. Add the technical values that touch the experience directly — Core Web Vitals measure whether a surface appears quickly and responds reliably to a tap.

On one figure that is unavoidable in this field: the widely repeated claim that every franc invested in UX returns a hundred goes back to an older Forrester publication and has been passed along ever since without a checkable calculation. The same applies to the claim that good UX raises conversion by 200 to 400 percent. Both are worthless for your project because neither states from what baseline, in which industry, over what period. We do not use them.

What is useful instead is your own baseline: how many visitors reach the contact form today, how many submit it, and exactly where the rest drop out. Those four numbers cost nothing beyond a clean analytics setup and make every later design decision verifiable — instead of a matter of taste between agency and management.

Which design fashions are currently running and which of them are actually useful is covered in UI/UX design trends. How layouts behave across screen sizes is explained under responsive design.