Product Design Company in Boston

Design work in Boston carries a cost line most cities do not: the artefacts you have to be able to show an auditor, on top of the screens themselves. Engagements run from a scoped Boston product design engagement over six to ten weeks for discovery plus a v1 design system and core flows, a full B2B SaaS console redesign at HubSpot or Toast complexity including research, IA, visual system, Figma library, accessibility audit, and engineering handoff, a biotech or clinical program under 21 CFR Part 11 (ELN, LIMS, eTMF, eConsent), which sits higher because of usability engineering file requirements, or an enterprise design ops program at Mass General Brigham or Fidelity scale. Boston rates sit just below New York and San Francisco. Fixed-fee, not T and M.

Massachusetts 201 CMR 17.00 requires every entity that owns or licenses personal information of a Massachusetts resident to maintain a Written Information Security Program (WISP). Design implications include explicit consent surfaces for collection, minimum-necessary data capture in forms, encryption indicators where applicable, session timeout and re-authentication patterns, and access logging visible to the user. We design these surfaces explicitly, document them in a WISP design appendix that your security and legal teams can attach to the program, and validate against the Massachusetts AGO\'s public guidance. For HIPAA-overlapping work we layer the HHS HIPAA Privacy and Security Rule design controls on top.

Yes. 21 CFR Part 11 governs electronic records and signatures for FDA-regulated work (ELN, LIMS, eTMF, eConsent, clinical trial systems, manufacturing batch records). Our process includes explicit electronic signature flows with re-authentication, full audit-trail visibility, time-stamped record locking, version-controlled SOP attachments, and IEC 62366-1 usability engineering documentation. We pair-design with regulatory affairs at clients like Moderna, Vertex, and Ginkgo-tier biotechs, deliver a usability engineering file with use scenarios, hazard-related use scenarios, and summative evaluation plans, and ship a Figma library that engineering can build against without re-interpreting the rule.

When a project requires genuine research (novel input modalities, ambient computing, computational biology UIs, BCI interfaces), we scope collaborations with MIT Media Lab affiliated groups, the Harvard Innovation Lab, or Northeastern Khoury College HCI faculty rather than overselling in-house capability. Our core team handles applied product design, design systems, accessibility, and engineering handoff, which is where most Boston design programs actually stall. For standard work (B2B SaaS, healthcare portals, fintech dashboards) no academic partner is needed. We will tell you up front which bucket your problem fits into, and we have introduced Boston clients to IDEO Cambridge alumni and EPAM Continuum when industrial design scope sits outside our team.

HIPAA-covered design in Boston means designing for the HHS Privacy Rule and Security Rule simultaneously. We use de-identified test data inside Figma and Storybook, never paste real PHI into prototyping tools, host any research artifacts containing PHI in BAA-covered storage (AWS, Google Workspace Enterprise, Microsoft 365 with BAA), and document minimum-necessary data collection in every form surface. For Mass General Brigham, Beth Israel Deaconess, Boston Children\'s, and Tufts Medical Center we have shipped patient-facing portals, clinician dashboards, and SDOH intake flows that cleared internal privacy office review on first submission. We sign BAAs through our US delivery entity when required.

Yes. We design tokens-first using Tokens Studio inside Figma and export through Style Dictionary into the shape your engineering team consumes. For HubSpot-ecosystem clients we ship tokens compatible with Canvas. For IBM-adjacent enterprise clients (Akamai, State Street internal tooling) we ship Carbon-compatible tokens. For Material-based stacks we extend the M3 token tree. For custom systems (Toast, DraftKings, Klaviyo style) we author bespoke token trees with documented contribution workflows. Output is React, React Native, Swift, and Kotlin friendly, and pair-design happens with engineering during the first two sprints to make sure the system is buildable.

A B2B SaaS design system at HubSpot or Toast complexity (foundations, tokens, 30 to 60 core components, two product surfaces) takes twelve to eighteen weeks from kickoff to v1. A 21 CFR Part 11 clinical or lab informatics system (ELN, LIMS, eConsent, eTMF) with usability engineering file takes twenty to thirty weeks because of summative evaluation cycles and regulatory documentation. Mass General Brigham or Beth Israel patient-facing portals with HIPAA, ADA, and WCAG 2.2 AA gates take fourteen to twenty weeks. We have shipped to these cadences for Kendall Square and Longwood Medical Area clients.

Massachusetts charges a 5% flat individual income tax plus a 4% surtax on income above $1M (the Fair Share Amendment, effective 2023), and 8% corporate excise on net income. Boston does not impose a city income tax. Services are generally not subject to Massachusetts sales tax (6.25% rate, which applies to tangible personal property and certain digital products), so design fees ship without sales tax unless we deliver tangible printed materials. For Boston-headquartered clients this typically nets cleaner total cost than New York-based design firms. We invoice in USD, accept ACH and wire, and provide W-9 documentation. International clients route through our Canadian or Indian entities under appropriate tax treaty.