Question 1

What's the difference between product design, UX design, and UI design?

Accepted Answer

Product design is the full end-to-end process: user research, problem definition, UX architecture, UI design, and developer handoff delivered as one engagement. UX design covers how a product works: information architecture, user flows, wireframes, and usability testing. UI design covers how it looks: design tokens, component library, visual hierarchy, and accessibility. At SH, you can buy them separately or together. Product design is one team handling all three. UX and UI are standalone engagements when you only need one layer.

Question 2

When should an enterprise hire an external design agency vs. build in-house?

Accepted Answer

Enterprises typically hire external design agencies in three situations: when an in-house team doesn't yet exist for a new product line, when an internal team is overloaded and a project would otherwise stall for months, or when the project requires specialized capability the in-house team doesn't have, like design systems at scale or research-heavy redesigns. External agencies also bring an outside perspective that internal teams, however talented, can't replicate. SH typically works alongside in-house product and engineering teams, not as a replacement.

Question 3

What deliverables should I expect from a product design engagement?

Accepted Answer

A complete product design engagement at SH delivers: a UX audit of any existing product, in-depth user interviews and personas, customer journey maps, information architecture, low-fidelity wireframes, a clickable prototype, high-fidelity screen designs, a comprehensive UI Kit and component library, accessibility (WCAG) documentation, and a developer-ready Figma file with annotated specs. Plus post-handoff support during the first sprints of development. Everything is structured so engineering can ship without back-and-forth on what was meant.

Question 4

How long does a B2B SaaS product design project take?

Accepted Answer

Timeline depends on scope. A focused UX engagement runs 6 to 12 weeks. A UI design engagement runs 4 to 8 weeks for a core product area, or 8 to 16 weeks for a full design system. A complete end-to-end product design engagement typically runs 12 to 20 weeks. We work in stages with regular review points so your team stays involved and aligned throughout.

Question 5

What is a design system and when do we need one?

Accepted Answer

A design system is a documented library of reusable components, design tokens, interaction patterns, and accessibility rules that every screen of your product is built from. Enterprise teams need one when their engineering team grows past 10 people, when visual inconsistency starts accumulating across sprints, or when onboarding new designers and developers takes weeks because there's no shared source of truth. A design system at SH includes design tokens, a Figma component library, documented interaction patterns, and full developer handoff. It pays back its cost within the first major feature it ships.

Question 6

UX audit vs. full redesign — which do we need?

Accepted Answer

A UX audit comes first. We assess your current product, identify the highest-impact UX problems, and prioritize them by user impact and implementation cost. From there, you decide what to fix. Many enterprise teams discover that targeted fixes to two or three critical user flows produce most of the benefit a full redesign would have delivered, at a fraction of the cost. Full redesigns are the right call when the product's information architecture is fundamentally broken, when the visual language is too dated to refresh incrementally, or when a major repositioning is happening at the same time. A UX audit is how you find out which one applies to you.

Question 7

How do we evaluate design quality before signing?

Accepted Answer

Three signals matter. First, look at case studies that resemble your situation. Did the agency design for enterprise scale, regulated industries, complex user roles, or B2B SaaS? Second, look at who they put on the project. Senior designers with 5+ years of enterprise experience produce different work than junior generalists. At SH, every design engagement is led by a senior designer with direct accountability. Third, ask about research methodology. Agencies that run real user testing on real users from your target group produce different work than agencies that skip straight to visual design. We run usability testing on every project. It's not optional.

Product, UX & UI Design for Enterprise Software.

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