UX/UI design agency: a specialist for every step, one team
Missing the skill in-house, or have it but not the time to produce?
We're a team of 12, in Bordeaux and Lyon since 2013, and our job is UX research, UX design, art direction and UI. Each discipline has its own specialists, and they work in the same team. The baton goes from gathering the need, through the UX audit or user testing, to wireframes and high-fidelity mockups.
When clients call on us
The projects entrusted to us often start from one of these situations.
- The skill doesn't exist in-house. Your team's job is to steer the launch of the website. To better understand users' needs, you bring us in upstream, and we define the specification that will then feed the mockups and the design.
- You have a UX team, and more projects than it can produce. You delegate projects to us: you steer them, we produce them.
- You're starting from a blank page, and you need to build the experience for your different user profiles. For Möko, we designed the English-learning platform, from the co-design workshops to the desktop and mobile mockups.
- Your product exists and needs an in-depth redesign, an improvement or new journeys. That's the case for a great many of our projects. For Bordeaux.fr, we reworked the content architecture and the site structure from the ground up, and built the main templates and journeys.
- Your organisation is changing and you need support over the long term. We've been working with Arcom for five years: a first portal for the new institution born from the merger of CSA and Hadopi, then the migration of the content of the two historic sites, and today the optimisation of what is online and the creation of new services.
Why one specialist per step
Understanding a need, translating it into journeys and wireframes, then giving it its graphic form: these are three disciplines. They complement each other, but an excellent researcher isn't necessarily a good UX designer, and a good UX designer isn't necessarily a good UI designer. With us, each step goes to someone whose job it is, and the handover happens inside the same team: what your users said during the research doesn't get lost on the way to the person who draws the screens.
How we work
You entrust us with one step, or the whole chain
Some clients entrust us with only one of the three disciplines: research for Alma (observation in 12 stores), MAIF (interviews with policyholders) or OUI.sncf (traveller personas). In general, we're more effective when we can follow the need through to the mockups, and hand over to your teams at the step where they're most relevant.
We start by learning your field
The project opens with a kick-off meeting, then you help us get up to speed on your field, your project and its critical points. That time is what lets us quickly identify what matters and be operational.
No major phase starts without you
Before each step, we submit what frames it: recruitment criteria and protocol if there is user testing, the outline of the co-design workshops, to check that it matches what you had in mind and that it will work with the people involved. Afterwards, you validate what comes out of it.
We show the work before it's finished
During the design sprints, whether it's wireframes, creative directions or high-fidelity mockups, we present the work in progress so you can sign it off. And before each delivery, we validate the consolidated whole with you.
Your developers, at the right moment
The project team goes beyond your own team: contractors, developers, SEO, accessibility. We involve developers neither too early nor all the time, but as soon as the drafts sketch out functionality that concerns them, in co-construction or in validation. Operational questions are settled in a small core team, and we widen it to stakeholders for strategic questions.
You steer, we take charge
We don't do contract staffing: on the part of the project we take charge of, we bring extra hands, but above all an expert eye, and the steering stays with you. It's extremely rare for it to be delegated to us. Tytl, a very long-term engagement, is one of those exceptions: we were the product's design team and led that scope, under the responsibility of its product team.
What you get at the end
Your users' needs, written up
Depending on the project, we gather them in workshops, in interviews, through a UX audit or through user testing, and we report them back to you. For Cultura, that took the form of 25 personas, built from 47 customers met in stores, 30 interviews with staff and a questionnaire sent to a thousand French people.
A specification
When the design comes afterwards, we hand you the specification that will make the mockups and the design of the site possible.
Desktop and mobile wireframes
They set out the architecture, the journeys and the main templates, validated with you over successive iterations. For Arcom's temporary portal, we designed 46 desktop and mobile screens, tested with users before being reworked.
High-fidelity mockups, ready to integrate
We deliver the creative directions, then the mockups of the templates, components and screens, in the agreed formats: desktop and mobile, with intermediate sizes if needed. For integration, we most often deliver a design kit, and sometimes a full design system, as we did for Tytl.
From the business tool to a city's portal
Clients who have their own designers entrust projects to us, because they expect the same level of quality from us as from their teams. We also work in fields that are very far apart: business tools, a city's portal, a property data platform, accounting software, the personas of a cultural retailer. We couldn't move from one field to another if it took us three months to get up to speed in each. The team includes three PhDs in cognitive engineering and is Opquast Web Quality certified.
Meet our teamClient testimonial
On this long-running project, Sami, Jean-Christophe and the whole team provided remarkable support, with great consistency in their listening, their advice and the quality of the deliverables.
A business tool, long-term support, a redesigned public portal
Addland becomes Tytl: a site to discover, a tool to work with
Read the case study
Bordeaux.fr: a portal that informs Bordeaux residents as much as it serves them, with no compromise on accessibility and eco-design
Read the case studyFrequently asked questions
Because you're missing a skill, or because your UX team has more projects than it can produce. With us, UX research, UX design, art direction and UI each have their own specialists, in the same team. We take on the part of the project you hand to us, and in general the steering stays on your side.
An agency that designs the experience and the interface of a digital product: it understands what users need (the research), translates it into journeys and wireframes (the UX), then gives it its graphic form in high-fidelity mockups (art direction and UI). Some add other disciplines, such as development. We don't develop the interfaces we design.
UX translates the need into architecture, journeys and wireframes. UI turns those wireframes into high-fidelity graphic mockups. They are two distinct skills, which we entrust to two different people.
They connect what users have said with what developers will build: they translate the need into journeys and wireframes, run the co-design workshops with your team, and show you the work in progress so you can sign it off.
On this question, you mostly find directories and comparison sites. To choose, look instead at whether UX research, UX design, art direction and UI are the agency's core business or one offering among others, whether each step goes to a specialist, whether it works in a wide range of fields, which says how fast it can get into yours, and whether it takes charge of part of the project or places people with you on a contract-staffing basis.