UareUx started the way most good ideas do – two people who worked well together deciding they’d rather do it on their own terms. Tanya in London, Iryna in Berlin, six years of shared history at a UX design agency and one conversation that made the rest of it obvious. The studio was fine. This is better.
Tanya thinks in systems. Iryna thinks in craft. Turns out two people who think completely differently can produce something neither could alone.
The work benefits from both of them being on it. Not because two people are always better than one – but because UX projects require someone who thinks in systems and someone who thinks in craft, ideally in the same room.
The projects vary. The way they work through them doesn’t much.
Five or six hours to the East Coast, depending on which of them you’re talking to. Enough overlap to make it work, not enough to pretend it’s the same as being in the room. Async by default – calls when something needs talking through. The time difference has never been the problem people expect it to be. It’s occasionally been an advantage.
Thirty minutes. Both of them, over Zoom. Tanya or Iryna will ask to see the actual product – not the deck, not the roadmap, the thing people are using. Most of what needs to be said comes out of that. Within a few days: what’s actually broken, how to fix it, and what that realistically costs.
Company-to-company contract. Scope, timeline, and payment terms agreed before anything starts. Nothing unusual in the paperwork, nothing that takes three weeks to sign. The least interesting part of working together. They try to keep it that way.
Tanya or Iryna – whoever’s on the project – is in the files, on the calls, making the decisions. No account manager translating the brief into something slightly different. No junior delivering while the senior checks in on Fridays. The person who found the problem is the person solving it.
The best projects don’t end at the handoff. They launch, get used, get refined. Tanya and Iryna tend to stay involved past the point most studios consider the job done. Not because it was written into the scope. Because a product that’s still being thought about tends to be better than one that isn’t.
Four European travel companies merged overnight – the website’s job was to make 300 B2B experts feel like one brand, starting with the photography.
Brand identity, a prequalification app, and a homeowner portal for a clean-energy financing company – the illustrations made it look simple; the flows made it be.
The brief is usually "fix the UX." The actual problem is usually bigger than that. These are the ones that got fixed, launched, and kept getting better – which is a lower bar than it sounds and a higher one than most agencies clear.
Three, and only three.
Each is something at least one of them has spent years on. Anything outside gets an honest no rather than a quote.
Research, flows, wireframes, prototypes, UI. The whole problem – not just the part that fits neatly into a scope.
Audits, strategy, design direction, team feedback. The answer to what’s wrong – and occasionally, what to stop doing entirely.
Positioning, structure, visual design and graphics. Most products are better than their websites suggest.
Tanya and Iryna write rarely and on purpose – about UX design, B2B website design, and the gap between how things should work and how they actually do.
The questions that come up before the first call. Most of them before anyone’s decided anything yet.
Because the alternative is hiring people to manage the people doing the work. Two covers systems and craft between them, and stays small enough that whoever you speak to is the one in the files.
Whichever problem it is. Tanya leans towards structure and product flows, Iryna towards visual craft and B2B websites. The first call is both of them, so that decision gets made with the product in front of them rather than off a brief.
The other one picks it up. Six years of working together means neither starts from scratch, and both have been on every project at least as far as the call. It is the practical argument for two rather than one.
Rarely, and never unannounced. Design and build are both in-house. If something falls outside that – illustration, motion, specialist research – they will say so and tell you who they would use. Nobody gets subcontracted into the work without you knowing.
Regularly, and usually for the same reason – someone wants a pair of hands to execute a decision that has already been made. That is a real service, and there are people who do it well. It is not this one.
