Product Design Company in Toronto

Toronto UI/UX pricing sits well above the national Canadian average because local talent competes with Shopify, Wealthsimple, and Big Five bank salaries. Agency-side, the number follows the depth of the engagement: a focused UX audit, a full product redesign for a mid-sized SaaS, or a multi-platform design system. In-house Toronto hiring is the other benchmark: junior UX designers cost 75-95k salary, seniors 120-165k, design leads 165-230k, and design directors 200-290k, before benefits and RRSP matching. Most of our Toronto clients run a lean internal team plus a Codazz pod as their surge capacity.

If your organization has 50 or more employees or is a public sector body in Ontario, the Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation under AODA already applies, and your websites and web apps must meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA. Even if you are smaller, enterprise procurement across the GTA now treats AODA conformance as a buying requirement, and Bill 194 is tightening public sector expectations further. We bake WCAG 2.1 AA into design reviews rather than bolting it on at the end: colour contrast, focus visibility, target sizes, keyboard navigation, screen reader labels, and form error handling all get validated before development starts.

Yes, and we treat Polaris as the benchmark because so many Toronto designers already read it daily. A Codazz design system engagement produces Figma libraries with variables and variants, a token pipeline feeding CSS or native code, documented usage guidelines in Zeroheight or Supernova, and accessibility annotations aligned with WCAG 2.1 AA. We start by auditing your existing screens, mapping component frequency, then designing foundations, primitives, and patterns in that order so your Toronto engineering team can adopt tokens incrementally without freezing the roadmap.

Bilingual design is planned from the first wireframe, not retrofitted. French copy in Canadian contexts typically expands 20 to 30 percent longer than English, so we design layouts that breathe: flexible buttons, wrapping headlines, and accordion patterns for dense content. For products serving Quebec users, we follow Law 25 for consent patterns, Office québécois de la langue française conventions for date and currency formatting, and we source reviewers who can validate tone. Every component in the Figma library ships with English and French string variants so your developers can wire localization through i18next, react-intl, or Rails I18n without hunting down edge cases.

Accessibility work for Ontario clients combines automated, manual, and assistive technology testing against WCAG 2.1 AA. We run Axe DevTools and Stark inside Figma and the browser, execute full keyboard-only traversal of every flow, and complete screen reader passes with NVDA on Windows and VoiceOver on macOS and iOS. For higher-stakes products we coordinate user testing with CNIB and partner agencies that connect with blind, low-vision, and motor-impaired participants across the GTA. Deliverables include a WCAG audit sheet, annotated Figma frames, and a prioritized remediation backlog your developers can file directly into Jira or Linear.

A typical Toronto startup engagement falls into three shapes. A focused discovery and UX audit runs 3 to 5 weeks and produces a research report, journey maps, and a prioritized backlog. A full MVP design for a seed or Series A fintech or SaaS product runs 10 to 16 weeks across discovery, UI, prototyping, usability testing with Toronto participants, and engineering handoff. A design system build runs 12 to 24 weeks depending on surface area. We align sprints to your EST product cadence, so MaRS and CDL founders can present progress at their weekly investor or cohort checkpoints.

Yes. Most Toronto product teams need web admin, responsive marketing pages, and native iOS and Android apps to evolve together, especially in fintech and retail where users jump between RBC web, RBC Mobile, and an Apple Watch complication in the same afternoon. We structure Figma libraries with platform-aware components and shared tokens so a single change to brand colour or spacing propagates cleanly. Research is run across devices: tree tests and surveys via Optimal Workshop for information architecture, and mobile-first usability tasks in Maze. Handoff goes to your web and native engineering leads at the same milestone.

Our core delivery team is based in Edmonton and Chandigarh, and we collaborate with a network of freelance senior designers across Toronto, including OCAD, George Brown, and Humber graduates with experience at Shopify, Rangle.io, Konrad, TribalScale, and Klick Health. If you need a Toronto-based design lead embedded in your office on King West or at MaRS a few days a week, we can staff that alongside our remote pod. For fully remote engagements we keep working hours overlapped with EST so reviews, research sessions, and stakeholder demos happen on your schedule.