According to Forrester Research, a well-developed UI design can increase conversion rates by 200%, while a good UX design can boost it by 400%. This makes intuitive and memorable design worth every penny you invest. In this article, we've outlined the key factors that contribute to the total cost of a design project, compiled statistics on average UI/UX design services pricing, and explained our method for calculating project costs.

How UI and UX design are different, and what are their cost?

UI and UX are separate concepts that aim to solve different problems during the overall design process. Let's delve into these concepts and understand how much these services typically cost.

UX design also named user experience design is about providing users with a convenient and smooth in-app experience. The design team builds up the structure of the interface by running UX research, conducting user interviews, creating wireframes and prototypes, and testing them with real users to ensure the interface is user-friendly. In contrast, during the UI design stage designers focus on the visual style and look of the interface. At this stage, a team aims to make the interface aesthetically pleasing by designing buttons, icons, spacing, typography, color schemes, images, and the overall layout.

To make these concepts clearer, let's compare them to building a restaurant. UX in a restaurant would involve choosing a convenient location, designing an intuitive layout so customers can easily find the restroom or exit, and placing the kitchen conveniently for timely service. On the other hand, UI design focuses on visual and sensory elements like decor, lighting, tableware, and music to make the dining experience enjoyable and memorable.

Although UX design and UI design are separate processes, they are inseparable and both of these entities aim to achieve a single goal — create a convenient and eye-catching interface that would help you reach your business goals. In our company, UI and UX design are also a single software development stage during which we create the app interface that matches your vision and requirements of the business domain.

As for the UI/UX design cost, let's take a look at the graph provided by Clutch, a digital service marketplace. According to these statistics, the average UX/UI design project cost is $10,000–$49,999 but depending on the complexity, it can cost more.

This is the cost of the UI/UX design projects that go through the stages of requirement forming, wireframing, prototyping, and finally receiving a fully-fledged design ready for development. However, in UX design, there are several advanced services that complex products may require. Here is the table with advanced UX design service descriptions and average prices provided by Clutch.

What aspects make up the cost of UI/UX design services?

Estimating the average app design cost is challenging because all projects differ in their complexity and require different resources. Each software development project is unique, that's why it's better to make an individual price estimate for each of them. However, some key aspects consistently influence UI/UX design costs, we have outlined them below.

Number of features

The UI/UX design cost highly depends on the number of features the application needs. A simple calculator app would be more cost-effective to design compared to an ecosystem of apps for taxi service that requires a consumer app, a driver app, and a robust admin panel for managing the entire service.

To illustrate this, we'd love to compare two Ronas IT software development projects from the point of their price and complexity.

It's worth noting that the table shows approximate prices for both the design and development stages. As you can see, the more apps in the ecosystem and user roles involved, the more features and app screens the designers need to develop. This added complexity requires more time and effort, leading to higher UI/UX design costs. While the high complexity of services increases costs, it also enhances the quality and user experience of the final product.

Feature complexity

We can release MVPs with minimum features required to start the business and test business ideas. However, it's often worth investing in complex functionality that makes users fall in love with your product. By complex functionality, we mean features that enhance convenience, provide personalization, and encourage repeated user engagement.

For instance, in your app, you can enable a user to add an avatar to the profile. This can be a regular user's photo. Alternatively, you can offer your user to have a custom avatar that would be able to get new unique features when the user interacts with your service. Such a system of custom avatars is used by Duolingo.

Of course, the custom avatars would be more complicated to create during the design process. They would take more time to implement, so the UI/UX design cost would rise. But on the other hand, your app would be more memorable and would encourage users to engage frequently potentially resulting in higher revenue.

Timeline

The number of features and their complexity directly affect the timeline of the design process. Nowadays many software development companies and UI/UX design contractors follow the time and material model. Within this model, the customer pays for the time designers spend working on the project. The bigger the scope of work, the bigger the timeline and UI/UX design cost would be. It's important to allocate the right amount of time to the design process — not too much, and not too little. Allocating less time than necessary can result in poor-quality design.

Development platforms

When embarking on the path of developing your own digital product, you will have to choose its platform — web, mobile, or cross-platform. Most likely, you won't get away with a single app but will need an ecosystem consisting of several apps. The more apps your ecosystem will need, the bigger would be the UI/UX design cost. Now let's review key differences in mobile app design and website design and understand how they affect the project cost.

Platform-specific design requirements

Mobile app design: Typically requires designing for multiple screen sizes as well as adhering to platform-specific guidelines such as Apple's Human Interface Guidelines for iOS and Google's Material Design for Android. During the design process, designers have to comply to these requirements, which adds complexity to the design and subsequently increases the UX design cost.

Web design: Requires responsiveness across different browser types and screen resolutions, often focusing on desktop and mobile views. While challenging, it might not involve as many stringent guidelines as mobile design.

User experience considerations

Mobile app design: In this case, designers think the interface through based on touch interactions, gestures, and limited screen space, which requires more detailed prototyping and testing.

Web design: Typically, designers rely on traditional navigation methods such as clicks and scrolls. With PC screens, designers also have more space to arrange the mockup, making website design potentially simpler.

Tech constraints

Mobile app design: Designers need to consider aspects like app performance on different devices, battery usage, and offline capabilities, adding to the complexity and app design cost.

Web design: While there are technical constraints like browser compatibility and load times, these are often less varied compared to the different hardware and operating system versions in mobile design.

In-app integrations

Mobile app design: Mobile apps usually need to be integrated with device hardware like GPS, cameras, and sensors which requires thorough planning and tailored design.

Web design: Digital products created during web development are less dependent on device-specific features.

All in all, product complexity is the greatest aspect that influences final UX design cost. However, mobile app design tends to be slightly more expensive compared to web design due to a bigger number of constraints and user experience considerations. When talking about UX/UI design and development platforms it's also worth comparing designing for native and cross-platform app development.

Cross-platform design

In software development, cross-platform apps are created from a single code base for iOS and Android operating systems.

Initial design: In this case, designers need to create only one set of wireframes, prototypes, and screens that can be used for both iOS and Android. Generally, this UX/UI design cost is smaller because a unified design is created for both platforms.

Adjustments: May still require some tweaking to ensure the design works well across both platforms, but this is typically less intensive than designing from scratch for each platform.

Native design

Native apps are created from two separate code bases and with the help of platform-specific tools and languages.

Initial design: More expensive because you need to design separately for iOS and Android. This involves creating distinct design systems, wireframes, and prototypes for each.

Optimization: Higher costs associated with ensuring each design is optimized and adheres to the respective platform's guidelines.

Overall, cross-platform UI/UX design tends to be less expensive. Although it may require adjustments and thorough testing, the entire scope of work is generally smaller, which results in smaller UX design costs. Native UI and UX design tend to cost more due to the need to maintain separate design assets and workflows for iOS and Android. That's why, if you are looking to make your UI/UX design project less expensive, it's better to opt for cross-platform approach or create an app for only one platform.

UI/UX design service cost

The total cost of your design project would highly depend on the rates your UI design contractor charges for the services. The rates your agency charges would depend on its experience and niche. There are several types of contractors you can hire:

• UI/UX design service cost
• The total cost of your design project would highly depend on the rates your UI design contractor charges for the services. The rates your agency charges would depend on its experience and niche. There are several types of contractors you can hire:

UI/UX design cost also highly depends on the location of your contractor. Agencies and freelancers from different regions charge different rates. According to Clutch, the rates are the following.

Detailed UI design

Apart from complex functionality, the sophisticated UI design is another thing that makes your product memorable and sticky. Additional graphic design elements are things that would make the look of your app more complex but also more expensive. As a part of graphic design you may get custom illustrations, brand identity elements, logos, or custom items and have them incorporated into the UI of your app.

For instance, within our Hamperapp project, we not only create interfaces for 4 different mobile and web apps but also enhance the visual identity of these apps and companies with custom illustrations. Of course, it took us some time to develop them and the overall UI/UX design cost of the project has increased. But the visual representation of the Hamperapp brand has also become richer.

How do we usually estimate UI and UX design costs?

Over 17+ years on the market, our team has estimated and accomplished many projects in UI and UX design fields. During this time, we have developed the most convenient method to estimate projects. Here are the steps we usually take.

Step 1: Gather requirements

Before estimating UI and UX design costs, our manager initiates a face-to-face online meeting with the customer and finds out about the idea and requirements. After all the details are discussed, the manager takes some time to discuss the project with the team and creates a project breakdown.

Step 2: Create a project breakdown

To outline all the features that need to be implemented during the software development, we divide the app into several flows and create user stories that are a short description of what users can do within each flow. Here's how our breakdown looks.

Step 3: Estimating UI and UX design cost and timeline

After all the functionality and UX design steps are described by user stories, we discuss the breakdown with our customer and prioritize the features leaving out the ones that our customer does not consider important. Then we count the number of hours required to create the design and an approximate price. If the customer requires not just design but also development we prepare a similar breakdown for the development stage.

What are the essential stages of the design process?

After the breakdown is completed and discussed with the customer, the design process starts. The design team goes through the procedures of UI and UX design to create the interface that would satisfy the customer. In this process, they most likely go through the following steps.

Mind mapping

The design process usually begins with creating a mind map which is a tree-like scheme where all the features are reflected. It allows designers to visualize the relationships between different parts of the interface. This helps in understanding how users will navigate from one section to another, ensuring a seamless user experience. Here's the mind map of our Oddscrowd app project.

Wireframes

Wireframes are an important part of user experience design that are simplified, low-fidelity visual guides that outline the skeletal structure of a user interface. They provide a basic layout of essential elements on a screen, such as the placement of buttons, menus, images, and content. Typically, wireframes are devoid of colors, fonts, or any other stylistic details, focusing purely on functionality and spacing.

Wireframes help the design team and their stakeholders to focus on core functions and navigation elements without being distracted by elements of the visual design. At this stage, designers build a clear content hierarchy, ensuring that the most critical elements receive the right emphasis.

Design concept

Another preparatory step in the design process is creating the design concept. The design concept represents a 2–3 app screens where the key features of UI design are shown. The design concept is needed to clarify, discuss, and approve the colors, fonts, and other visual elements with the customer. We usually prepare design concepts to ensure that the right visual style is chosen and that we fully align with the vision of our client. Here's one of our design concepts for a betting app.

Prototype

Another important stage of UI/UX design and product management is creating a clickable prototype. Usually, it represents the series of interconnected screens that the stakeholder can click through to find out how the app would work.

Why is this stage necessary? A prototype is essential to demonstrate behavior. Static screens don't always make it clear how components will interact or where the user will navigate after a specific screen. Instead of explaining this to stakeholders verbally, it's easier to create a prototype that makes everything clear. If there are any animations on the screens, it's better for the team to show it in the prototype before implementing it in code. This is particularly important in the website design process.

Fully-fledged design

When designers complete all the preparatory steps and discuss all the visuals with the customer, they move move on to create a fully-fledged design and implement all the approved features and UI and UX design principles.

The designers incorporate branding elements in the design, create the interface following Human Interface Guidelines and Material Design principles, and think through the responsive layout for further mobile or web development. Then they discuss the created mockup with the customer and hand it over to the software developers, who start developing the app.

UI-kit

UI-kit is the set of UI elements like icons, panels, and buttons that are gathered in the process of the design. As the UI-kit grows, the designers may not rebuild the existing UI elements but reuse them and speed up the design process. At Ronas IT, we usually gather the UI-kit for every project and hand it over to each of our customers so they can easily scale up the existing mockup.

Why such a lengthy design process is needed?

Why is there a need for a mind map, wireframes, and a design concept and why can't the designers just move straight to assembling a fully-fledged design? The answer is in the fact that the greatest factor that makes the design timeline and raises the app design cost is the lack of common vision of the interface between the customer and the project team.

By making all these preparatory steps, we build up the shared vision of the future visuals. The design team constantly discusses each created entity with the customer and ensures that nothing will have to be redone after the fully-fledged design is created. Consequently, the design timeline won't grow and neither will UI and UX design cost.

Example of a UI/UX design cost estimate

To make the process of UI and UX design cost calculation even clearer, we have decided to show you one of the cost estimates for a web design of the booking app. With the help of this app, users can add information about their own trips to the app, book tickets for various events, and add all their trips to the planning list to create a schedule of their leisure. Here's the table with flows, features, and hours.

As you can see, the total number of hours is 83, which takes about 17 days to complete the mockup. Considering that we charge $50 per hour, the total UI/UX design cost would be $4,150. This estimate looks quite realistic since most of our web design projects usually cost $4,000–$10,000.

The estimations are usually prepared by a project management specialist and a design team to ensure that the estimated timeline matches the required resources. It's important to note that estimating the design price with complete precision is challenging. During the design process, you may need to make changes to the mockup or require additional iterations to achieve the desired result. Consequently, the final price may vary from the initial estimate.

Wrapping up

UI and UX design costs in software development projects can vary significantly depending on the requirements and complexity involved. While intricate designs may come at a higher price, they often result in increased user engagement, making the investment worthwhile. If you need a cost estimate for your design project, feel free to contact our team for a detailed discussion.