Design that holds up in production, not just in a prototype.

UX and interface design cover the screens someone interacts with. Service design covers the whole journey around those screens, including what happens off-screen: a human handoff, an email confirmation, a warehouse process, that the customer experiences as one continuous thing even though it crosses multiple systems and teams. We do both because a beautiful interface still fails if the process behind it is broken.

Both. The same research and journey-mapping discipline applies whether the user is an external customer or an internal team member using a tool to do their job. Internal tools are often where bad design costs the most in wasted time, even though they get the least design attention.

By building interface design systems, components defined once and reused consistently, and by validating designs with prototype testing before a line of production code is written, so problems get caught in a clickable prototype instead of after engineering has already built it. And because IT sits in the same company, there's no handoff gap between the design file and the build.

Both qualitative and quantitative: interviews and usability sessions with real users, alongside behavioural data on how people actually use the current product, rather than assumptions about how they should use it. Step one is explicitly research and discovery before any screen gets designed.

Yes. An existing design system is a starting point, not something we override by default; we extend and refine it as needed rather than replacing it, unless the audit shows it's genuinely holding the product back.

Real users. Usability testing is a defined step in the process, not an optional extra. Designs get validated against actual behaviour before production code gets written, because internal opinion about what's intuitive is a poor substitute for watching someone actually try to use it.