Research with your actual users
Interviews with customers and front-line staff, usability sessions on the current product, and a written read of support tickets and analytics. Design arguments then point at evidence instead of preference.
Fractional Teammates · Creative & Content
A senior UI/UX designer embedded in your product team
Research, task flows, wireframes, a component library in your brand, and specifications your developers can build from. A designer from the OlDevs studio works inside your Figma, your tracker and your standups each week.
A senior specialist, not a junior placement You own the work and the accounts Reply within one business day
oldevs.com1.8s · 100
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What a ui/ux designer is
OlDevs places a fractional UI/UX designer inside your organisation for a defined slice of each week, on an ongoing basis.A senior designer from our Vancouver studio owns how your product behaves: interviews and usability sessions, task flows, information architecture, wireframes, a component library built in your brand, and specifications the build team implements, including focus order, contrast and error states to WCAG 2.2 AA. They work in your Figma, your ticket tracker and your standups, review staging builds against the design, and leave every file in accounts you control. It is an ongoing seat rather than a fixed-scope project, with the rest of the studio behind it.
Key facts
- 01Role
- Fractional UI/UX Designer
- 02Engagement
- Set days each week, ongoing
- 03Works in
- Your Figma, tracker and standups
- 04Ownership
- Files, research and design system stay yours
- 05Typical commitment
- 1–2 days a week
- 06Judged on
- Components reused · Design-to-build rework · Usability issues found
Creative & Content
What the designer owns
What this teammate takes off your plate
Flows, structure and wireframes
Task flows and a screen inventory for the journeys that matter, then greyscale wireframes covering empty, loading, error and permission states. Structure is settled before anyone opens a visual file.
A component library your developers build against
Type scale, spacing, grid and a documented set of Figma components with every state drawn. New screens get assembled from parts that already exist rather than redrawn each sprint.
Prototypes tested before the sprint starts
Clickable prototypes of the riskiest part of a journey, put in front of real users or stakeholders, with the changes made while the work is still a file rather than a release.
Handoff with accessibility already decided
Redlines, responsive rules, focus order, keyboard paths, contrast ratios and error copy written into the specification, so developers are not guessing and WCAG 2.2 AA is not a retrofit.
Design QA on what actually ships
The designer opens your staging build, compares it against the specification, files the differences in your tracker, and sits with the developers to agree which ones are worth fixing.
Benefits
The shift when one person owns the screens
01
Interface arguments end in evidence
A designer who has sat with your users settles screen debates with recordings and a written rationale, so the same argument does not return next quarter with a new set of opinions.
02
Screens stop being built twice
Work reaches developers already decided, with states, errors and empty screens drawn, so the build stops pausing for questions and rebuilding a screen after the first demo stops being routine.
03
New screens inherit old decisions
Squads shipping in different quarters draw on the same components, spacing and words instead of inventing their own, so the gap between the sections built last year and the ones built now stops widening.
04
Accessibility stops being a retrofit
Contrast, focus order, labelling and keyboard paths are settled while a screen is still cheap to change, so you stop running remediation projects after a complaint, an audit or a procurement questionnaire lands.
05
Rebuild experience lands on ordinary screens
Few products hold a full week of design decisions, but the ones they do hold are hard to undo later. You get someone who has taken products through rebuilds, design systems and accessibility reviews before.
06
The reasoning outlasts the designer
Files, component libraries, research recordings and the note explaining each decision live in your own tools under your own licences. When the engagement changes shape, whoever picks the work up can read why, not guess.
How it works
From first call to first design cycle
A look at the product, not a discovery deck
We walk through your product, your backlog and who currently decides what the interface does. If a fractional designer is the wrong answer, we say so on that call.
A written quote and a named designer
You meet the designer who would hold the role, see relevant work, and get the weekly commitment and the first ninety days in writing before anything is agreed.
Accounts and a design audit in week one
The designer gets seats in your Figma, tracker and chat, meets the people who own the product, and inventories the screens, patterns and components that already exist.
Research before pixels
The first cycle is interviews, usability sessions and flows for one real slice of the product. Wireframes follow. You see decisions with reasons attached, not a mood board.
In your standup, every week
The designer joins your existing standups and shows work weekly: what was tested, what changed, what is queued. Feedback goes on the file, not into a monthly report.
Who it's for
Where this role earns its place
Fractional design fits when interface decisions are being made every week by people whose job is something else. Here is where that is true, and where it is not.
Engineering teams deciding the interface by default
Developers are choosing layouts, labels and states between tickets because nobody else will. A designer for part of the week gives them flows, components and specifications instead of guesses.
Products being rebuilt on top of a legacy system
A working system with twenty years of accumulated screens. Someone has to decide what the new interface does before the rebuild starts, and keep deciding as it lands.
Public-facing services with an accessibility duty
Government bodies and associations whose services must meet WCAG 2.2 AA. Focus order, contrast and error handling get designed into the flows instead of patched after an audit.
Where fractional design is the wrong call
If you need a designer in every product conversation, or the work is one launch with a fixed end date, hire full-time or commission the project instead.
12+
Years of studio experience since 2014
1–2
Typical commitment — 1–2 days a week
EN/FR
Languages this engagement can be delivered in
Other fractional roles
Often paired with
01
Front-End Developer
Your interface layer gets an owner: components, responsive layout, state, performance budgets and WCAG 2.
Explore02Graphic Designer
Ads, decks, print, packaging, and the templates that stop your team redrawing them.
Explore03Conversion & Analytics Specialist
One senior specialist owns your GA4 and server-side tracking, the event design underneath it, and the experiment programme that tests pages, forms and funnels.
ExploreFAQ
What product teams ask us first
With what exists. The first fortnight is an inventory of your current screens and patterns, interviews with the people who own the product, and a short list of the journeys that generate the most support volume. Work then starts on one of those journeys rather than on a redesign of everything, so you have flows and wireframes you can build from inside the first few weeks.
It helps, and we will ask. Five or six conversations with real users settle more than a month of internal debate. Where customer access is restricted, the designer works with the people closest to them instead: support staff, sales, account managers, plus your ticket history and analytics. We say plainly which findings came from users and which came from proxies, so nobody mistakes one for the other.
It gets argued in your standup, not by email a week later. The designer explains the reason behind a decision, hears the implementation cost, and changes the design when that cost is real. Being embedded is what makes this possible: they sit in the same rituals as the people building it. Where a disagreement touches accessibility, the standard settles it rather than the loudest voice.
Yes. Where nothing exists, the first cycles build the minimum: a type scale, colour with tested contrast, spacing, a grid and a small set of components drawn from whatever brand material you have. Where guidelines already exist we work inside them, and only raise a change when a rule fails an accessibility or usability check. Identity work itself can come from the studio's graphic designers.
When design decisions come up several times a day rather than weekly, when you are shipping one product launch and then stopping, or when nobody on your side can approve a direction. A designer who spends the slice chasing approvals is not doing design. If your product would keep a designer busy five days a week, the honest advice is to hire, and we will give it.
In your own analytics, against numbers you choose before the work starts: task completion on a flow, support tickets about a screen, drop-off at a step. The designer reports against those in the weekly demo, including the cycles where a change made no measurable difference. Nobody can honestly guarantee a conversion outcome from design alone, and we do not.
Let’s connect
Let’s talk about the ui/ux designer gap.
Tell us what is not getting done and roughly how much of a week it needs. We’ll reply within one business day with who would cover it and a tailored quote — no obligation.