Web design
Website accessibility and UK law: what a business site must do (WCAG 2.2)
No UK law names WCAG for private businesses, but the Equality Act 2010 still applies to your website. What the law expects, when EU…
· 9 min read
UX design is the work of making sure people can do what they came to do on your website or app: find the price, book the slot, compare two products, donate, get a quote. We do UX and UI design for businesses across the UK at £55 an hour plus VAT. A focused review of an existing site typically costs £440–£750 before VAT; full design for a new site is more often £935–£2,200.
Good UX is mostly invisible. Nobody emails to say the checkout made sense. They just buy. When it is bad, you rarely hear about it either; people leave and buy from someone else. That is why we treat UX as the cheapest place to fix problems. Moving a form field on a wireframe takes a minute. Moving it after the site is built, tested and live can take a day of development and another round of testing.
Who comes to us for UX work
- Businesses about to commission a new website or app who want the structure right before anyone writes code.
- Owners whose sites get decent traffic but few enquiries or sales, and who suspect the problem is the site rather than the marketing.
- Product teams with a working app that customers find confusing, judging by support tickets and one-star reviews.
- Organisations that need to meet accessibility expectations. Our accessibility-led redesign concept for WWF started from exactly that brief.
- Agencies and in-house developers who want a designer to produce the wireframes and UI, then build it themselves.
UX and UI: the difference, briefly
UX covers structure and behaviour: what goes on each page, in what order, what the buttons say, what happens when someone makes a mistake. UI is the visual layer on top: type, colour, spacing, icons, components. Clients often ask for UI (“make it look modern”) when the real problem is UX (nobody can find the delivery costs). We do both, but in that order. A beautiful page with the wrong content in the wrong place still loses customers.
What we deliver
- A UX review of your current site or app with a prioritised list of fixes, ranked by likely impact and effort.
- An analytics review: where people arrive, which pages they leave from, which form fields they abandon.
- User journeys for the tasks that make you money, such as booking, buying, requesting a quote or signing up.
- Sitemaps and navigation labels tested against the words your customers actually use, not your internal jargon.
- Mobile-first wireframes for key pages and screens.
- Clickable prototypes you can try on your phone and put in front of customers.
- UI design with a small design system in Figma: type scale, colour, spacing, buttons, forms, states and errors.
- Accessibility designed in from the first wireframe, to WCAG 2.2 AA.
How we work
Understand
We start with your analytics and a conversation with you and whoever answers the phone or the inbox. Front-line staff know exactly where customers get stuck because they hear about it every day. Where possible we speak to a handful of customers too. For a small business this takes days, not weeks.
Structure
We map the main journeys and the information each step needs, then sketch pages as wireframes. Most of the value is created here, so we spend proper time on it. Expect opinions from us: if your pricing page hides the price, we will say so.
Prototype and test
Wireframes become a clickable prototype and we watch five or six people try to complete real tasks. It sounds like a tiny sample, but it reliably exposes the biggest problems. Testing runs remotely by video call, so participants can be anywhere from Belfast to Brighton, or in person if you prefer.
Design and hand over
We apply your brand to the tested structure and produce final designs and components ready for development. If we build it, the designers and developers sit in the same team. If your own developers build it, we hand over Figma files and specifications and can review their build against the designs.
Accessibility is part of UX, not an add-on
Around one in four people in the UK report a disability, according to the Department for Work and Pensions’ Family Resources Survey, and far more have temporary or situational limits: a broken wrist, a cracked phone screen, bright sun on a bus. The Equality Act 2010 requires service providers to make reasonable adjustments for disabled people, and that is widely understood to cover websites. WCAG 2.2 is the recognised standard for what good looks like, so we design to AA from the start: contrast, visible focus states, labelled form fields, clear error messages and touch targets large enough for real thumbs. Our guide to website accessibility and UK law covers the legal side in more detail.
What it costs
UI/UX design is £55 an hour plus VAT, booked on our hire us page, with volume discounts from 5 % at 10 hours to 25 % at 100 hours. Hours never expire. These ranges are typical, not quotes.
| Project | Typical effort | Cost before VAT |
|---|---|---|
| UX review of an existing site with written fixes | 8–15 hours | £440–£742.50 |
| Wireframes and prototype for a small business site | 15–25 hours | £742.50–£1,168.75 |
| Full UX and UI design for a new site | 20–50 hours | £935–£2,200 |
| App or portal UX with user testing | 50–100 hours | £2,200–£4,125 |
A worked example: 20 hours of design is £1,100, less 15 % is £935, plus VAT of £187, so £1,122 in total. You can pay in full or with a 50 % deposit. If you also need a logo or visual identity, Brand Identity Design is £50 an hour.
Where does design end and the build begin? Our fixed-price website packages include design for straightforward sites. Separate UX work makes sense when there is real complexity: bookings, a shop with many product types, a member area, or a site that already exists and underperforms.
Common UX problems we fix
- Prices, delivery costs or lead times hidden until the last step.
- Forms that ask for too much, then wipe everything on a single error.
- Navigation labelled with internal team names that customers don’t recognise.
- Mobile menus that bury the one action most visitors want, usually call or book.
- Low-contrast grey text that looks elegant on a designer’s monitor and is unreadable on a phone outdoors.
- Search that returns nothing for common misspellings.
Working with us
Our team is based in London and we run workshops in person in London and the Home Counties when it helps. Most UX projects work just as well remotely, with clients in Manchester, Leeds, Bristol, Cardiff and Edinburgh sharing screens and Figma files with us. If you have a site or app that isn’t converting, or a new project you want to get right first time, tell us about it. You can start with a review and decide what to do with the findings, or see how UX feeds into our web development process.
