Expert UI Design Services for Websites and Mobile Apps
UI design is the work of turning a product's structure into the concrete thing a user touches — the visual language, components, states, motion and accessibility behaviour of every screen. What changed in 2026 is the deliverable. A picture of a screen is no longer the output. The output is a token set, a component library and a set of code mappings that a coding agent can query directly, plus the accessibility conformance evidence that European law now requires you to hold.
Mixcore Studio has designed and built software for over eight years with a team of around twenty, across more than 320 delivered projects. On UI work we take responsibility for the part that usually breaks after handoff: whether the interface that reaches production is still the interface that was designed.
What changed in 2026 — the design file became an interface to code
At Config 2026 on 24 June, Figma shipped six things at once: Code Layers (executable code on the canvas, by waitlist), Figma Motion (a native timeline with keyframes and presets, generally available from the same date, with React export and MP4, WebM, animated SVG and GIF output), AI shader fills and effects, plugins generated from a prompt, Weave node-based generative workflows, and an upgraded Figma agent with skills and connectors for Notion, Slack and GitHub. The agent is free during its beta and consumes no AI credits; once it reaches general availability, standard AI-credit usage applies, which makes design tooling a metered line item rather than a flat seat cost.
The more structural change is the Figma MCP server. A coding agent can now query a file's component hierarchy, variables, layer tree and Code Connect mappings continuously, instead of being handed a flat image or a one-way spec. That inverts the economics of file hygiene: naming, variable structure and component discipline are no longer housekeeping, they are the input quality of your code generation. Feeding an agent screenshots instead of tokens is a ceiling you build yourself.
Static handoff is finished as a practice. Redline specs and Zeplin-style PNG exports have been superseded by Dev Mode, Code Connect and MCP. Two tools that may still be in your stack are dead: Adobe XD is no longer under active development, and InVision shut down its design and collaboration products at the end of 2024 — invisionapp.com now redirects to Miro. If a client hands us an InVision prototype link, that is dead infrastructure and we say so. Penpot is the credible open-source alternative where self-hosting matters.
The Figma 2026 AI Report, based on 8,403 survey responses and 639 interviews across ten markets, found that 41% of product builders say AI meaningfully changes how their teams work together today, against 7% two years earlier. In the same report, 60% of developers now participate in design work, up from 44%, and 41% of designers participate in development, up from 21%. The boundary moved; the need for someone to decide what the interface should be did not.
- Interface design — screen and flow design for web, iOS and Android, with every state specified rather than only the happy path.
- Design system and component library — variants, states, composition rules and usage guidance, built to be consumed rather than admired.
- Design tokens in DTCG format — colour, type, spacing, radius and motion, generated out to web, iOS, Android and Flutter targets.
- Code Connect mappings — design components bound to their real code counterparts so agents and developers resolve the same source.
- Accessibility specification and audit — contrast, focus order, target size, keyboard paths and screen-reader behaviour, tested rather than asserted.
- Interface motion — transitions and micro-interactions specified with timing and easing, and with a reduced-motion path defined at the same time.
Design tokens and systems that reach production
The zeroheight Design Systems Report 2026, a survey of 147 design-system practitioners, found design tokens in 86% of design systems. It also found that only 40% of teams have any kind of token pipeline, and only 11% have any working code-to-design sync. Most teams are copying values by hand between design, documentation and code. The same report found only 8% describe their design system as very stable, while 34% call it unstable and a further 10% very unstable, and that satisfaction with organisational buy-in fell from 42% to 32% year on year.
That is the failure mode a UI engagement has to design against. A documented system that drifts from production is the normal outcome, not the exception.
The Design Tokens Community Group specification reached its first stable version, 2025.10, on 28 October 2025, built by more than twenty editors and authors with contributions from Adobe, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Salesforce, Shopify and Figma. It covers theming and multi-brand, light, dark and accessibility variants, Display P3, Oklch and the rest of CSS Color Module 4, token aliases and inheritance, and cross-platform generation for web, iOS, Android and Flutter. Reference implementations are Style Dictionary, Tokens Studio and Terrazzo, with support in Figma, Penpot, Sketch, Framer, Knapsack, Supernova and zeroheight.
One procurement detail worth stating plainly, because vendors often blur it: DTCG is a W3C Community Group publication. It is explicitly not a W3C Standard and not on the W3C Standards Track. If your contract language requires a formal standard, that wording needs to name the specification and its version rather than claim W3C endorsement. What DTCG does give you is the tooling ecosystem, which a homegrown token schema now costs you entirely.
The Design Tokens Resolver Module, which handles alternate values per context such as light, dark and high-contrast, breakpoint sizing, reduced motion and colour-vision modes, is still a preview draft, marked as not to be implemented or cited as authoritative. We track it. We do not build client pipelines on it yet, and we handle context switching with the stable primitives instead.
Accessibility is a legal requirement in the interface, not a polish pass
The European Accessibility Act (Directive (EU) 2019/882) has applied since 28 June 2025 across all 27 member states, and national market-surveillance authorities have begun opening cases against non-compliant service providers. No confirmed EAA fine had been verified as of mid-2026, so anyone quoting you a settled penalty figure is guessing. Penalty ceilings are set nationally rather than by the Directive and vary sharply between member states, so exposure has to be checked against the law of each market you sell into.
The technical bar is EN 301 549, produced jointly by ETSI, CEN and CENELEC. The harmonised version the European Commission still points at is V3.2.1, which incorporates WCAG 2.1 Level AA. A version 4 moving clauses 9, 10 and 11 to WCAG 2.2 Level AA is in preparation but has not yet been cited in the Official Journal. That alignment adds six success criteria over WCAG 2.1 at the levels that matter — two at Level A and four at Level AA.
We therefore design and test to WCAG 2.2 AA, not 2.1. WCAG 2.2 has been a W3C Recommendation since 5 October 2023, updated 12 December 2024, and contains 86 success criteria. It is backwards compatible, so meeting 2.2 also meets 2.1 and 2.0. Writing 2.1 AA into a contract signed in 2026 buys you a re-audit as soon as the harmonised standard moves.
WCAG 3.0 is a different matter. The latest Working Draft is dated 3 March 2026 and its own text states that requirements will be added, combined and removed and that the conformance model is still under revision. No law references it. Building toward it today is speculative work, and we will say so rather than bill for it.
On overlays and accessibility widgets, our position is fixed. The US Federal Trade Commission brought a deceptive-marketing case against accessiBe over claims that its automated product could make any website WCAG 2.1 AA compliant; the proposed consent order was published in the Federal Register on 6 January 2025 and bars that claim. More than 1,000 accessibility professionals have signed a public statement against overlays. In litigation they now function as an aggravating factor, because the widget's separate and inferior interface is itself evidence of a barrier. Remediation belongs in the markup. If you ask us for an overlay, you will get this explanation in writing instead.
Two related points of scope. The EAA microenterprise exemption is narrow: fewer than 10 employees and turnover or balance sheet total no more than €2 million, and it covers services only, not products. And an Article 14 disproportionate burden claim is not a shrug — it must be documented against the Annex VI criteria, made available to enforcement authorities on request, and reassessed at least every five years. Outside the EU, the US Department of Justice published an Interim Final Rule in the Federal Register on 20 April 2026 extending ADA Title II web compliance by a year, to 26 April 2027 for public entities serving 50,000 or more people and 26 April 2028 for smaller and special district entities, with WCAG 2.1 AA as the standard. The extension does not suspend underlying nondiscrimination and effective-communication obligations, and private plaintiffs can still sue in the meantime.
Designing AI features without defaulting to a chat box
The 2026 consensus is that conversational UI loses to graphical UI for structured, verifiable, recoverable tasks. Chat is poor at linear reading, at recalling context, and at multi-turn error correction, which is most of what people actually need to do with a product. The patterns that work are agentic and ambient rather than conversational: showing the plan before acting, disclosing which tools are being used, letting the user set an autonomy level, streaming partial results, tracking multi-step workflows visibly, and making recovery and escalation cheap. Bolting a chat box onto a product now reads as a decision not made.
Where generated UI is genuinely the right answer, a stack has formed around declarative JSON specifications: A2UI, an open format in which an agent emits declarative JSON that the client renders with its own native components; Open-JSON-UI; the OpenAI Apps SDK for React rendered inline in ChatGPT; MCP Apps and mcp-ui for host-rendered UI returned by tools; and AG-UI, an event-based protocol for streaming agent UI into your own frontend. Choosing among these is an interface decision with architectural consequences, so it belongs in design, not only in engineering.
There is also now a legal floor. EU AI Act Article 50 transparency obligations have applied since 2 August 2026, with Commission guidelines adopted on 20 July 2026 and a Code of Practice on Transparency of AI-Generated Content signed by about 190 organisations on 31 July 2026. Users must be told they are interacting with an AI in a way that is perceivable in the interaction itself. A line in terms and conditions, a metadata-only watermark, or a euphemistic "assistant" label does not satisfy it. Deepfakes must be labelled and AI-generated or altered content must carry machine-readable marks. Non-compliance carries fines up to €15 million or 3% of worldwide annual turnover, whichever is higher. That disclosure is a designed element with a defined position, contrast and persistence, so we treat it as a UI deliverable and name who owns it in the contract.
Native platforms — and why shipping the default is not automatically safe
Both mobile design languages re-based, and Apple's is now effectively compulsory. Since 28 April 2026, apps uploaded to App Store Connect must be built with Xcode 26 or later against an SDK for iOS 26, iPadOS 26, tvOS 26, visionOS 26 or watchOS 26. This governs the build SDK, not the deployment target, so you can still support older OS versions. The consequence for design is that building against that SDK applies Liquid Glass to native controls by default unless you opt out.
Liquid Glass was announced at WWDC in June 2025 and spans iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS Tahoe 26, watchOS 26, tvOS 26 and visionOS 26, with real-time lensing, specular highlights that respond to device motion, and adaptive shadows. It is also the subject of a critical usability read from Nielsen Norman Group, published as "Liquid Glass Is Cracked, and Usability Suffers in iOS 26". So the default is not automatically the safe choice: translucent surfaces move contrast around depending on what is behind them, and contrast is a WCAG success criterion with a legal deadline attached to it. We test the adopted appearance against the same conformance bar as everything else, and we opt out of specific surfaces where it fails.
On Android, Material 3 Expressive shipped to Pixel devices with Android 16's first quarterly release in 2025, bringing a spring-based motion physics system along with updated components, colour schemes and type. Google has since rolled it through its own apps, which sets the user's expectation before your app is opened.
For web motion, the primitives improved enough to remove a lot of JavaScript. Safari 26.0 added CSS scroll-driven animations (animation-timeline with scroll() and view()) alongside anchor positioning, joining Chromium support from version 115. These run on the compositor and ship no JavaScript at all. View Transitions now has Firefox support for same-document transitions alongside Chrome and Safari, with cross-fade as the fallback where named-element transitions are unsupported. Figma Motion output slots into this: it is built to be inspected in Dev Mode and exported to code, so an animated frame can be passed to a coding agent rather than described in a document.
When a UI design engagement is the wrong spend
A better interface on an unvalidated product is expensive decoration. If you do not yet know which problem the product solves for whom, research and structure come first, and interface work should wait until there is something worth rendering well.
A full design system is usually wrong for a single product with one squad and no second consumer. The maintenance cost is real and, on the zeroheight 2026 numbers, most systems are not stable and buy-in is falling. For that situation a DTCG token file and a set of component conventions is enough, and we will recommend it over the larger engagement. Systems earn their cost when there are multiple products, multiple platforms or multiple teams consuming them.
Custom interface layers are also the wrong choice for a team with no capacity to maintain them. If nobody will own the visual layer after handoff, adopting the platform defaults — Liquid Glass on iOS, Material 3 Expressive on Android — is cheaper and ages better, even though it looks less distinctive. Choosing the boring option deliberately is a design decision; drifting into it is not.
On the pricing question buyers now ask directly: if AI tools made this faster, why is the invoice similar? Because the compressed part is production, not judgment. You can get to something that looks about 70% right on your own laptop with Figma Make, v0 or Lovable. The remaining 30% is deciding what should exist, making the states and edge cases correct, meeting a conformance bar that has legal consequences, and being accountable for the result. The Figma 2026 AI Report puts it as well as anyone: "AI can build almost anything. What it can't do is determine what's worth building." Worth budgeting separately: AI-credit pricing has arrived inside the design tools themselves, so ask any agency for the recurring tooling number, not just the project fee.
One last honest note on distinctiveness. The most common objection we hear now is that everything looks the same — the same typeface, the same gradient, the same rounded cards. That homogenisation is real, and it comes from generating a surface rather than deciding a register. We would rather argue with you about the register at the start than deliver competent sameness on time.
Our expertise
- Design systems and tokens
- WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility
- Design-to-code handoff
- Native iOS and Android UI
- Interface motion
- AI interaction patterns
Frequently asked questions
What accessibility standard should we specify in a 2026 contract?
WCAG 2.2 Level AA. The current harmonised standard EN 301 549 V3.2.1 still points at WCAG 2.1 AA, but a version 4 moving the relevant clauses to WCAG 2.2 AA — six extra success criteria at Levels A and AA — is in preparation and has not yet been cited in the Official Journal. Specifying 2.1 now means paying for a re-audit later. WCAG 3.0 is a Working Draft dated 3 March 2026 whose own text says requirements will change, so it is not a compliance target.
Do you use accessibility overlays or widgets?
No. The US Federal Trade Commission brought a deceptive-marketing case against accessiBe over claims that its automated product could make any website WCAG 2.1 AA compliant; the proposed consent order was published in the Federal Register on 6 January 2025 and bars that claim. Overlays now work against defendants in litigation because the widget's separate, inferior interface is itself evidence of a barrier. We fix accessibility in the markup, the components and the tokens.
How do design tokens actually get from Figma into our production code?
We author tokens in the DTCG format, stable at version 2025.10 since 28 October 2025, and generate platform output with Style Dictionary, Tokens Studio or Terrazzo for web, iOS, Android and Flutter. Components are bound to their real code counterparts with Code Connect, so the Figma MCP server can serve a coding agent the component hierarchy, variables and mappings rather than a screenshot. The zeroheight Design Systems Report 2026 found only 40% of teams have any token pipeline at all, which is why we treat this as part of the deliverable rather than an extra.
Should our AI feature be a chat interface, and what do we have to disclose?
Usually not chat. Conversational UI underperforms graphical UI for structured, verifiable tasks, and the patterns that work are planning visibility, tool-use disclosure, user-set autonomy levels, streaming results and cheap recovery. On disclosure, EU AI Act Article 50 has applied since 2 August 2026 and requires the AI interaction to be disclosed in a way that is perceivable in the interaction itself. Terms and conditions, a metadata-only watermark or a vague "assistant" label do not satisfy it, and fines reach €15 million or 3% of worldwide annual turnover.
Should our iOS app adopt Liquid Glass?
In practice you are already partly in it. Since 28 April 2026, App Store Connect uploads must be built with Xcode 26 or later against a 26-series SDK, and that applies Liquid Glass to native controls by default unless you opt out. It affects the build SDK, not your deployment target. Nielsen Norman Group has published a critical usability assessment of it, so we test the resulting contrast and legibility against WCAG 2.2 AA and opt specific surfaces out where they fail rather than shipping the default unexamined.
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