Freelance UX/UI design: from research to a prototype in code

UX (user experience) is how something works: the steps you take to get what you came for, where you get stuck, what you understand without being told. UI (user interface) is the visible layer: typography, colour, spacing, components. A gorgeous UI on top of a confusing UX is a bad product with a good face.

In practice, fully separating them is artificial: I work on both, because every visual decision affects usage and vice versa. If someone sells you "just UI" for a product with flow problems, be wary — that's repainting the façade while the pipes are broken.

It depends who you ask, so here are my numbers: a usability audit starts around €800, and a full UX/UI project — research, interfaces and a navigable prototype in code — usually runs between €2,000 and €6,000. What moves the price: number of flows and screens, depth of research, and whether a UI kit needs building or consolidating.

These are ballpark senior-freelance figures. Every project is quoted individually after a first call, with a fixed written price before we start — no surprises, no weird invoice lines.

Less than you fear, but more than zero. I won't sell you three weeks of interviews if you already know your users well: sometimes research means reviewing what you already have — analytics, support tickets, sales conversations — and talking to four or five real users. That's usually enough to surface two or three assumptions nobody had questioned.

What I won't do is skip the phase entirely: designing on assumptions is expensive, because what you save up front you pay back multiplied in rework. If there's genuinely no time or budget for it, I'll say so and we'll move on — putting in writing which risks we're taking.

Yes, and it's a good way to start if you're not sure how much project you need. I review your site or app against usability heuristics and against your real data if you have it, and deliver a short report with problems prioritised by impact and effort: what to fix now, what can wait and what isn't worth touching.

Fair warning about what it isn't: not a 60-page document to justify the fee, and not bait to sell you a full redesign. If your interface is reasonably fine, I'll tell you — and sometimes the honest conclusion is that your problem isn't a design problem.

Both, and I look at what you have before deciding. If your design system works, I design within its rules and extend it only where needed — breaking consistency so the designer can show off is a classic move that you end up paying for. If you don't have a system, I won't build you a cathedral: a light UI kit with documented components, states and tokens more than covers most growing products.

And if your system exists but is broken — three different buttons, colours with no logic, nobody sure which version is the right one — I'll propose consolidating it as part of the project, with that part itemised in the quote so the decision is yours.