Mobile UI2024
Rebuilding a regional transit app around one thumb
Four counties, six years of feature creep, and a home screen that answered every question except the one riders were actually asking.
Northbound TransitRead case study
UI design studioEstablished 2017
UI design that survives contact with a real product.
Baseline Studio designs interfaces for mobile and web: the flows, the components, the empty states, and the specifications your engineers can actually build from. A small senior team, three projects at a time.
- Designing product interfaces
- 9 yrsDesigning product interfaces
- Sectors, from transit to dev tools
- 5Sectors, from transit to dev tools
- Concurrent projects, deliberately
- 3Concurrent projects, deliberately
- Interface design
- Design systems
- Component libraries
- Design tokens
- Accessibility audits
- Interactive prototypes
- Responsive specs
- Design to code handover
- Usability testing
- Motion specs
01What we do
Four ways to work with the studio
Most engagements start with one of these and grow into another. All of them end with something an engineering team can build without a follow-up meeting.
A clear-eyed read of the interface you already have.
- Screen-by-screen annotated review of every core flow
- Heuristic findings scored by severity and fix effort
- WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility findings with the specific failure noted
2 to 3 weeksDetailsEnd-to-end interface design, from first flow to final state.
- User flows and task maps for every journey in scope
- Wireframes for structure, agreed before any visual work starts
- High-fidelity screens at mobile, tablet and desktop widths
6 to 12 weeksDetailsOne set of components your designers and engineers both trust.
- Token architecture in JSON, with platform outputs for web, iOS and Android
- Figma library with variants and props named to match the code
- Component specifications covering states, sizes, slots and content rules
8 to 16 weeksDetailsSomething clickable in front of real people, fast.
- An interactive prototype covering the flows in question, not a slide deck
- A written test script with the tasks and the questions behind them
- Five to eight moderated sessions with participants matching your users
2 to 5 weeksDetails
02Selected work
Interfaces built for the hour after the demo
Six of our recent engagements. Each one describes the problem we walked into, what we changed, and what happened afterwards.
Web UI2025
An invoicing dashboard that stops burying the money
Fourteen widgets, six charts, and no answer to the only question a finance lead opens the product to ask.
LedgerlineRead case study
Design Systems2024
One design system across six insurance products
Six products, four front-end stacks, and eleven different buttons that all did the same thing.
Meridian InsuranceRead case study
Mobile UI2024
Savings goals that survive a bad month
A savings app that treated every missed deposit as a failure, told in red, to people who were already having a difficult month.
VesselRead case study
Web UI2024
A type foundry storefront that shows the type properly
A shop selling typefaces where you could not set your own words in one before buying.
Foundry TypeRead case study
Design Systems2025
Component documentation developers actually read
A well-built component library with adoption problems that turned out to be documentation problems.
SignalRead case study
03How we work
Five stages, in this order, every time
The order matters. Structure gets settled before anything is styled, and nothing ships without being pressure-tested against the build.
- 01
Orient
We read the product before we redraw it. That means using it properly, sitting with the people who support it, and finding out which screens carry the weight. Most projects reveal their real problem in this first fortnight.
You get
- Product teardown
- Flow inventory
- Agreed success measures
- 02
Frame
Before any visual work we agree what each screen has to do and in what order. Structure gets settled in wireframes, where changing your mind costs an hour rather than a week.
You get
- User flows
- Wireframes
- Scope agreement
- 03
Draw
High-fidelity interface design, reviewed weekly in the open. No month of silence followed by a reveal. You see the work while it is still cheap to change.
You get
- Screen designs
- Component definitions
- Responsive behaviour
- 04
Prove
We put a working prototype in front of people who match your users and watch what happens. Disagreements that cannot be settled in a meeting get settled here instead.
You get
- Interactive prototype
- Test sessions
- Findings memo
- 05
Ship
Specs, annotations, states and a live handover with the engineers who will build it. Then we review the build as it lands, because design that is never checked against the running product is a guess.
You get
- Redlines and specs
- Handover session
- Two build reviews
04What clients say
The reviews we quote are the blunt ones
Four of the people we have worked with, on the part of the engagement they remember.
They deleted more of our app than they added, and it is the best thing anyone has done for it. The home screen now answers the question people actually opened it to ask.
Ilse DraperHead of Digital, Northbound Transit The audit was uncomfortable and completely correct. We had been measuring how much we shipped, not whether anyone used it. Four years of widgets came down to four that matter.
Priya RamanChief Product Officer, Ledgerline The slide with eleven buttons on it did more for adoption than the library did. Six squads stopped arguing the moment they saw the count.
Helena FitchGroup Design Director, Meridian Insurance For two years we optimised for the demo. They made us optimise for Tuesday afternoon, which is when our product is actually used.
Marek SobolDirector of Design, Quarry
05Start a project
Tell us what is not working yet.
Send a few sentences about the product and where it is getting stuck. One of the two studio partners reads every enquiry, and you will hear back within two working days either way.
- Prefer email
- studio@baseline.design
- Current availability
- Taking on two engagements for the coming quarter.
- Typical reply time
- Two working days, from a partner rather than a form.
