The UI/UX design agency for products that mostly work
Nobody ships broken products on purpose. They ship products that work fine, mostly, and then add features, and then mostly doesn't, and now it's a roadmap item. Then a bigger one arrives. Then someone leaves. Then the original item is still there, technically, and will be addressed, definitely, next quarter.
Nobody decided this. It just happened, the way things happen when everyone's busy and the product mostly works and mostly is usually fine.
Tanya Donska built DNSK.WORK for mostly. No kickoff deck. No next quarter. A UI/UX design agency without the agency part.
Case Studies
Not every broken product is a startup that moves fast and breaks things on purpose. Some have been around long enough to know better, and the broken flow has been there just as long. Enterprise software. Critical infrastructure. A member portal used by every dentist in America.
This is the UI/UX design agency work that doesn't make it to Dribbble. The stakes are different. The work is too.
Research Staff Portal for IQVIA
Prometheus Research (now IQVIA) partnered with us to design their Research Staff Portal
A Data-Sharing Hub for Deutsche Telekom
A data-sharing hub designed to enable efficient collaboration, rapid solution deployment, and actionable insights to drive revenue growth.
ResearchHub
ResearchHub is a platform built to change how science is shared – faster, more open, and built around real collaboration.
Argyle
Argyle delivers real-time, user-permissioned income and employment data straight from payroll systems
/ 01
What is UI/UX design and why does everyone have a different answer?
What is UI/UX design and why does everyone have a different answer?
UI is the interface – what you see, click, and interact with. UX is whether any of it actually helps you do the thing you came to do. In theory they're separate disciplines. In practice, a UI/UX design agency that treats them separately usually delivers something that looks polished and functions poorly. The two only work when the same person is thinking about both at the same time – which is why most products end up with screens that are technically complete and practically confusing.
/ 02
How much do UI/UX design agencies charge, and why is the answer always "it depends"?
How much do UI/UX design agencies charge, and why is the answer always "it depends"?
Most UI/UX design agencies charge between $15,000 and $150,000 depending on scope, team size, and how many people need to be in the kickoff call. The price usually reflects the agency's costs more than the value of the work – senior time, junior time, account management, project coordination, the office nobody asked for. The math is simple: the more layers between you and the person actually doing the design, the more you're paying for things that don't show up in Figma. What separates a good UI/UX design services company from an expensive one isn't the rate – it's how much of that rate reaches the actual work.
/ 03
Who provides UI/UX design for B2B companies when hiring is too slow and an agency is too much?
Who provides UI/UX design for B2B companies when hiring is too slow and an agency is too much?
Three options in theory. Hire a full-time senior designer – six months to find one, another three to onboard them, assuming they stay. Hire a UI/UX design agency – two weeks to scope, three weeks to propose, four weeks of discovery before anything gets touched. Or find a UI/UX design services company that works embedded, moves at the speed of a freelancer, and brings the depth of a product team. DNSK.WORK sits in that third category – senior-led, embedded, built specifically for B2B SaaS products that have outgrown their original design decisions.
/ 04
What is the difference between UI and UX design, and why does fixing one without the other never work?
What is the difference between UI and UX design, and why does fixing one without the other never work?
UI without UX is a beautiful product nobody can use. UX without UI is a logical flow nobody wants to touch. The reason so many products get both wrong is that most teams fix them in sequence – UX first, then UI, handed off between disciplines like a relay race. By the time the interface is designed, the UX decisions are locked. By the time someone notices the flow is broken, the UI has been approved. A UI/UX design agency that separates the two is solving half a problem at a time.
/ 05
Why is UX design important when the engineers have already built it?
Why is UX design important when the engineers have already built it?
Because the engineers built exactly what they were asked to build. The problem is what they were asked to build. UX design is the work that happens before a single line of code – the decisions about what a product should do, how it should behave, and whether the person using it will understand any of it. When UX is skipped or rushed, engineers fill the gaps with assumptions. Those assumptions become features. Those features become the screens nobody wants to touch. A UI/UX design services company hired after launch isn't adding UX. It's replacing the decisions that should have been made earlier.
/ 06
How do you know you've found the best UI/UX design company before you've signed anything?
How do you know you've found the best UI/UX design company before you've signed anything?
Three signals. First: they talk about your product before they talk about their process. Second: the person in the sales call is the person who'll do the work. Third: they tell you something you didn't already know in the first thirty minutes. Any UI/UX design services company that leads with credentials, case studies, and a methodology slide has spent more time on the proposal than reviewing your product.
/ 07
Why do most UI/UX design agencies get startup work wrong?
Why do most UI/UX design agencies get startup work wrong?
Because startups need decisions, not process. Most UI/UX design agencies are optimised for managing large engagements – discovery phases, stakeholder alignment, approval chains. None of that exists in a startup. There's one founder, one product, and a runway that's shorter than the agency's onboarding checklist. The best UI/UX design services company for a startup is one that treats speed as a design constraint, not an inconvenience. One that makes opinionated calls without needing three rounds of feedback. One that's already in the product before the kickoff deck is finished.