UX design agency in Dublin: what you are actually buying
Good UX shows up in your numbers before it shows up in a portfolio: fewer abandoned forms, fewer support emails, and buyers who reach what they came for instead of giving up.
You usually arrive with one of three problems. People land on your site and leave without enquiring. Your team spends its week doing by hand what the system should do for them. Or you have a product idea and no clear view of which parts of it matter.
What a UX design agency in Dublin is really selling you is four things:
- Research. What your users actually do, what they are trying to finish, and where the current version stops them.
- Information architecture. The structure underneath: what is a category, what is a filter, what is a step, and what has to be findable from everywhere.
- Interface design and a design system. Every screen, and every state each screen can hold, drawn once and reused.
- Testing. Watching real people use it before it is engineered, while changes are still cheap.
Most studios sell the third one. The value is in all four, and in nothing being lost between them. We design and engineer under one roof through our web and mobile apps service, so a decision made in research survives into the live product instead of being reopened by a team that was not in the room.
UX is also rarely bought on its own. If the outcome is a site that explains the business and brings in enquiries, start at web design in Dublin. If it is a product people log into, app development in Dublin covers native, web app and PWA.
Loco Digital was founded in Dublin in 2021 by Mark Murphy and Adam Murphy. We work from The Digital Hub in Dublin 8, for companies in Cork, Galway, Limerick and across Ireland.
UX research: what you learn before anything is designed
The point of UX research is to stop you paying to build the wrong thing, and it is almost always shorter than people fear.
It is deliberately practical. We talk to the people who use your product and to the people in your team who support them, we read what your analytics and search data already say, and we note every place the current screens make a user guess. For a membership platform that means treating members, administrators and the board as three readers of the same data. For a booking product it means the VAT and invoicing reality behind the checkout, not just the checkout.
What comes out is written down: the audiences, the flows, the data each screen needs, and the decisions that are now closed. That is why the design phase is fast and the estimate underneath it holds. If you already have solid research, we will use yours rather than sell you the same work twice.
UI/UX design in Dublin: one system behind every screen
Plenty of studios offer UI UX design in Dublin and stop at the design file. Doing both halves changes what you get.
UI design is the visible layer: the layout, the type, the colour, the components, the states. UX is the thinking underneath: what the screen is for, what happens when the form fails, where the user goes next. Split them across two suppliers and you pay for the gap between them.
Past a handful of screens, we design the system before the pages. For ESMA International Network we drew an atomic design system of 1,421 component variants across three breakpoints, with every interactive element drawn in every state rather than only the happy path. Form fields shipped in six states, calendar days in eleven, the profile-edit flow in forty-eight. It is why the public website, the member dashboard and the native iOS and Android apps read as one organisation rather than three suppliers.
That pays you back twice. Users stop relearning the product, and developers get components instead of interpretations, which is where the schedule is won. Accessibility is designed in here rather than bolted on later: we design to WCAG 2.1 AA and check the journeys that matter by keyboard and screen reader, not by an automated scan alone. For services selling to consumers that is a legal question as well as a quality one, and our guide to the accessibility rules sets out who is in scope.
Usability testing: proving it before you pay to build it
Usability testing is simple, and uncomfortable in a useful way. You give a person a real task, you watch them try, and you say nothing.
We design in working prototypes rather than flat pictures, so what you review can be clicked through on the devices your users actually hold. We test with a small number of people who match your real users, one at a time, and each gets the same tasks: find the thing, book the thing, complete the form.
You get the findings ranked by what each one is costing you, with a fix beside it. Most are small: a label, an order, a missing confirmation. They are the ones nobody inside the business can see any more, because you all already know how it works, and fixing one at this stage costs an afternoon instead of a release.
A UX audit of the product you already have
You may not need a redesign. You may need to know which three things are costing you enquiries.
An audit is a fixed piece of work on your existing site, app or portal. We go through the journeys that matter to your revenue, check them on a phone and by keyboard, and read the analytics you already have. You get a plain written view: what to fix this month, what to redesign, what to leave alone, and what is a build problem wearing a design problem’s coat.
Some of those items your own team can fix in an afternoon, and we will say which ones rather than quote for all of them. If the platform itself is the ceiling, website redesign in Dublin covers how a rebuild runs without losing the rankings you have earned.
Dublin UX company or freelance designer: how to choose
Both can be the right answer, and the deciding factor is rarely the portfolio. Four questions separate a Dublin UX company from a freelance designer.
- Who engineers it? A design handed to a separate development team gets renegotiated in private. Ask whether the designer and the engineer are the same organisation.
- What do you get at the end? A picture of a product, or a design system with every state, ready to be built? The second one is the asset, and ask what is yours to keep.
- Who actually does the work? Ask whether the person in the meeting is the person designing your screens. At Loco, Mark and Adam are in the first call and in the build.
- What happens in year two? A design system with an owner keeps its logic. A folder of screens does not survive its first three feature requests.
We are a strong fit when the product has real users, real data and a workflow behind it. We are not the cheapest option for a single screen or a quick visual refresh, and we will say so on the first call rather than sell you more design than you need.
Proof: two products where the UX was the job
ESMA International Network: 200 members, 62 countries, one source of truth
ESMA’s network was the product, and the website was not carrying it. Two hundred companies sat in a flat list with no categories, no countries and no product taxonomy, so finding a Portuguese frozen-goods distributor meant emailing the CEO.
We designed and built the membership platform, the public website, the member dashboard and the native iOS and Android apps that are live in both stores. The directory now thinks in taxonomies: six filter facets work at once across two hundred companies, and product categories nest, so a buyer looking for chilled organic beverages sold into Iberian supermarket chains gets there in four clicks instead of one email. Members maintain their own records through a guided six-step flow, which is what keeps the data accurate, and each one now sees clicks on their website link, their contacts, the map and every social channel. Read the ESMA case study.
ERP HEADtoHEAD: four steps, one order, one invoice
The hard problem here was hidden from the user by design. ERP HEADtoHEAD runs two events in two countries and two currencies for Lumenia Consulting, billed by two separate legal entities into two merchant accounts, and the delegate should never have to think about any of it.
So the entity resolves first. Choose a place at the Dublin event and the order summary already names who is billing you and in what currency, with Irish VAT on the net price, while the Birmingham event routes to the UK company on its own rate. The booking is four steps: places, with group rates applied automatically; your details; attendees, where each delegate gets their own record and day selection; then review and pay. Read the ERP HEADtoHEAD case study.
What does UX design cost in Dublin?
It depends on how much product there is and how much of it is unknown, and anyone quoting before they know that is guessing. We work to a scoped, costed plan agreed before anything is designed, so the number is fixed before the work starts and moves only if you change the scope.
Projects at Loco start from €10,000. UX is not a separate line on top of that figure. It is the first half of the work the figure buys, because a product should not be engineered before anybody has used it. Where a client wants the design phase on its own, whether that is an audit, a research and structure phase or a tested prototype to take to a board, we scope and cost it separately before any build commitment. For the wider context, see how much a website costs in Ireland.
How the work runs: consult, design, build
- Consult. A short consult ending in a scoped, costed plan: who this is for, what it has to do, and what it will cost.
- Design. Research, structure, interface and the design system, reviewed as something you can click rather than something you have to imagine. You steer while decisions are cheap.
- Build. Engineered by the same team, tested on real devices, and launched with the keys in your name: the code, the data, the accounts and the design files.
After launch we host, maintain and improve what we build through a monthly retainer from €2,000/month, with a senior contact who knows your product. Nobody has to take one: a project can end at launch and you keep everything.
