We don't just research.We ship UX.

SaaS UX design has three properties generic UX work doesn't. First, the core value is abstract — a user can't pick up a SaaS product and know what it does, so onboarding has to explain the offer and prove value inside the first session. Second, activation is the north-star metric — typical B2B SaaS activation rates sit at 20-30% (best-in-class 40%+, per Amplitude and Mixpanel benchmarks), meaning 6-8 out of every 10 signups never see value. Third, the product lives across two surfaces — the end-user UI and the admin/settings side — and churn happens on the admin side when power users can't get work done. Generic UX shops skip the admin surface; dedicated SaaS UX work treats it as 50% of the product.

SaaS UX design agency deliverables on every engagement: Our b2b product design scope covers authenticated app UX — admin panels, onboarding flows, dashboards, form-heavy workflows, and settings screens — not just the marketing site.

• ICP workshop + 5-8 customer interviews
• Jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) map + 2-3 persona snapshots
• Journey map covering signup, activation, core loops, admin tasks
• Information architecture + nav hierarchy + role-based access model
• Low-fi wireframes and high-fidelity Figma prototypes for the 3 highest-leverage flows
• 5-user moderated usability tests with synthesised fix backlog
• Accessibility pass (WCAG 2.2 AA — see the W3C WAI guidelines)
• Production handoff to engineering with tokens, components, and spec
• Post-launch analytics wiring + day-14 activation review

Most agencies ship 1-5 or 6-10; we ship the full stack.

Enterprise UX is dominated by three constraints startups don't face — deeper role-based access models, legacy-system integration, and compliance requirements (SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR, and Section 508 accessibility — see Section508.gov for US federal digital accessibility standards). Startup UX prioritises speed and experimentation: the product changes weekly, the ICP is still forming, and perfect rarely beats shipped. We work with funded SaaS startups moving into enterprise contracts — the hard transition from 'what product-market fit feels like' to 'what a Fortune 500 procurement team demands.' That bridge work (audit trails, role matrices, admin consoles, SSO) is most of our product UX work.

For a standard engagement: 5-8 stakeholder interviews in week 1 (founders, PM, CS lead, engineering), plus review of your existing analytics (Mixpanel, Amplitude, PostHog), session recordings (Hotjar, Microsoft Clarity), and support-ticket themes. 5-8 customer interviews across your main persona(s) in weeks 1-2. 5-user moderated usability tests on each major prototype — industry usability research suggests 5-6 users surface roughly 85% of usability issues, which makes more tests with more prototypes a better ROI than longer tests with the same prototype. Total research phase: typically 2-3 weeks inside a 4-6 week sprint. As a saas product design agency, we pair research with production-ready deliverables — not just prototypes. Wireframes ship as Figma files with dev annotations; component libraries export to your React or Vue stack.

Both, with most of our work on the admin/dashboard side. A funded B2B SaaS product has two UX surfaces: the end-user experience (activation, core loops, value delivery) and the admin experience (settings, user management, role-based access, billing, integrations, audit logs, internal-ops tooling). Churn predominantly happens on the admin side — when a power user, admin, or ops person can't configure, monitor, or export what they need, the contract doesn't renew. Our dashboard design work covers data viz (charts, tables, filters, drill-downs), role-based access views, form-heavy settings pages, and workflow admin tools. Examples in portfolio: Hesytech's robotic control UI, Joltoo's advisory dashboard, N² Labs' automation admin.

SaaS onboarding design starts from activation: what event, inside the first session, proves the product's value? (Slack's activation event is first message in a channel; Calendly's is first booked meeting; your product has one, even if nobody has named it yet.) We map the shortest path from signup to that event and design every step to remove friction — progressive disclosure, empty-state coaching, sample data, guided tours, tooltip hierarchies. Form friction is the #1 drop-off in B2B SaaS signup: every non-essential field kills 5-15% of completion rate (industry benchmarks vary). Target activation rate: 30%+ for a solid B2B SaaS product, 40%+ for best-in-class (per Amplitude/Mixpanel product benchmarks). A typical b2b ui ux agency hands off Figma files and disappears; Waveup ships production code alongside designs, and stays embedded through the first post-launch A/B cycle.

Two monthly retainer tiers, month-to-month, with unused hours rolling over:

• Scale — $5,000/month (intro; $7,500 regular). Two concurrent workstreams, 25 partner hours or 70 team hours. Fits focused product UX work — dashboard rebuild, onboarding flow, admin-UI refresh.
• Multi-workstream — $10,000/month (intro; $12,500 regular). Four concurrent workstreams, 55 partner hours or 150 team hours. Fits parallel dashboard + onboarding + marketing work.

For benchmarking: Superside profiles B2B UX agencies at $3K-$25K project packages with retainers from $3K/mo. Enterprise shops like Clay and Frog work on blended rates quoted per engagement. Waveup is the only sub-$10K/month retainer in this SERP that includes research + design + build + instrumentation as one deliverable. Full pricing: /pricing/.

Accessibility is part of every design pass — not a separate workstream. We design to WCAG 2.2 AA: 4.5:1 colour contrast, visible focus states, keyboard-navigable flows, screen-reader-friendly semantic HTML, and properly labelled form fields. US-based teams building for federal or government-adjacent buyers also need Section 508 compliance, which aligns with WCAG but adds procurement-specific requirements (see Digital.gov's user-experience guidance for public-sector UX standards). Under the ADA, commercial websites and software have been found subject to accessibility obligations in multiple federal court decisions. Beyond legal risk, accessible products convert better — 15-20% of users have some accessibility need (temporary or permanent), so anything less excludes a material share of your ICP.

Your product UX is one of the three things a Series A partner opens during diligence: the pitch deck, the financial model, and the live product. If the admin UI looks half-finished, the dashboard doesn't render on an investor's laptop during the demo, or the onboarding flow dead-ends — the 'does this team know how to ship' question answers itself the wrong way. Because Waveup runs the fundraising arm alongside design, we've watched dozens of investor demos turn on a rough product surface. Hesytech closed $8M seed on the dental-robotics control UI we shipped in 3 weeks; Joltoo's advisory dashboard was the product demo in their raise. UX is part of the raise, not adjacent to it.