Discovery research
Interviews with real users and the people who support them, plus an audit of what the current product actually does versus what anyone believes it does.
Service 01
Product design that survives handover
Research, flows, a design system your engineers can actually build against — not a Figma file that dies at handover.
Softrear runs product design as part of engineering, not ahead of it. You get research, user flows, and a coded design system that the same team then builds against — so nothing is lost between the design file and production.
Who this is for
- You have a product that works but nobody can explain how it should behave.
- Your last agency delivered beautiful screens your engineers could not build.
- You are adding a second platform and the two look like different companies.
What you get
Deliverables, not adjectives.
Flows and information architecture
Every state, including the empty, error and offline ones. The states nobody designs are the states that generate support tickets.
A coded design system
Tokens, components and usage rules, shipped as code in your repository — not a library of detached Figma symbols.
Accessibility built in
WCAG 2.2 AA colour, focus, target size and keyboard behaviour specified at design time, so it is not a remediation project later.
Prototype for the hard parts
The two or three interactions everything hinges on, built as working code and tested with users before the rest is committed.
How it runs
- Week 1 — audit, interviews, and the list of what is actually broken
- Week 2 — flows, IA and a first pass at the visual direction
- Weeks 3–4 — design system foundations, shipped as code
- Ongoing — design works one increment ahead of build, in the same standup
Tools & standards
We choose per project and write down why. A stack chosen because it is what the last team knew is a stack nobody can defend at review.
Questions we get asked
Can you work with our existing design system?
Yes, and we prefer it. We audit what exists, fix what is inconsistent, and extend it. Replacing a design system is a decision with a real cost, and it is usually the wrong one.
Do you do design without build?
We do, but we scope it as a standalone engagement with a named engineering reviewer, because design that has never been sanity-checked against a codebase is how handover failures start.
The rest of the stack
02
Mobile
Flutter, React Native and native iOS/Android — shipped through the stores, instrumented, and supported after release.
03Backend & APIs
Domain modelling, event architecture, contract-tested APIs, and the unglamorous migration off the system you cannot turn off.
04Web frontend
Marketing sites, dashboards and customer portals built for Core Web Vitals, accessibility and the person maintaining it next year.
05Cloud & DevOps
Infrastructure as code, SLOs that mean something, a real on-call rotation, and a quarterly review of what it all costs.
06Managed support
SLA-backed support for systems we built and systems we inherited, with the metrics published to you monthly.
Tell us what’s stuck.
A senior engineer reads every one of these. If we’re not the right fit we’ll say so, and point you at someone who is.
Start the conversation
No spam, no drip sequence. A senior engineer replies within one business day.