We offer two ways to bring UX expertise into your business: an ongoing consultancy relationship for teams that ship regularly without in-house UX support, and standalone usability testing for a specific project or decision. Usability issues are often only caught after launch, in a support queue, a drop in conversion, or feedback you weren't looking for, once they're already costing you something. Both services are built to catch problems earlier than that.
We offer two ways to bring UX expertise into your business: an ongoing consultancy relationship for teams that ship regularly without in-house UX support, and standalone usability testing for a specific project or decision. Usability issues are often only caught after launch, in a support queue, a drop in conversion, or feedback you weren't looking for, once they're already costing you something. Both services are built to catch problems earlier than that.
They solve different problems, and most businesses only need one of them at a time.
An ongoing relationship where we review upcoming designs, flows or features before they ship, rather than after. For a team without a designer or UX researcher on staff, this means usability issues get caught while they're still a straightforward fix in a mockup or prototype, rather than after users have already run into them in a live product.
A standalone engagement testing a specific flow, feature or prototype with real users, built around one particular project or decision, a launch, a redesign, a new feature, or a flow you want validated before committing to it. Where consultancy is ongoing support across everything you build, usability testing is focused on one specific piece of work.
If you ship regularly and don't currently have anyone checking usability before release, ongoing consultancy tends to be the better fit, it catches issues at the point they're cheapest to fix. If you've got one specific project or decision coming up, a launch, a redesign, a new flow, and want it validated with real users before committing to it, standalone usability testing is more targeted and doesn't require an ongoing commitment. Some clients start with a single usability testing engagement, then move to ongoing consultancy once they've seen what it catches.
A UX audit is a one-off expert review of something that already exists, used to diagnose a specific problem you've already noticed. UX consultancy and usability testing are different in two ways: consultancy is ongoing rather than one-off, and usability testing specifically involves real users completing real tasks rather than an expert review alone. If you haven't built anything yet and need to validate a problem or understand your users' needs first, our User & UX Research page is the earlier starting point.
| UX Audit | User & UX Research | Consultancy & Testing | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best for | Diagnosing a problem in something that already exists | Validating a problem before you've built anything | Ongoing support, or testing one specific project |
| Format | Expert review, one-off | Interviews and open-ended research | Ongoing review, or real users testing one flow |
| Ongoing or one-off | One-off | Scoped per project | Either, depending on which service |
For consultancy: we agree a cadence and scope up front, what gets reviewed, how often, and how you'll get feedback, then work to that rhythm alongside your existing release process, flagging risk before it ships rather than after.
For usability testing: we scope the specific decision it needs to inform, recruit the right participants, run sessions, and turn findings around at a pace that fits your timeline.
Ongoing consultancy tends to suit teams shipping regularly without a designer or UX researcher checking work before release, who want usability issues caught early rather than discovered by users after launch. Usability testing tends to suit teams with one specific project or decision, a launch, a redesign, a critical flow, who want it validated with real users before committing to it.
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