You know this by now.

If you want to command premium pricing for your UI/UX design services, you need to niche down.

I’m fascinated with niche design business and I collected a bunch of URLs over the years. It’s so counterintuitive to decide to serve a smaller set of clients and yet one of the easiest ways to separate yourself from the sea of sameness and get paid well.

Today I will share three awesome examples:

#1 An industry niche

This is when you offer UI/UX design services to a single industry.
An industry is a group of companies that are related based on their primary business activities. To mention a few: Healthcare, Fintech, Creator Economy, Wellness, and so on. You get the idea.

Example: Hanno

If you notice Hanno does digital product design for the health industry. But you can’t find a portfolio on their website. What they do instead is have a podcast. Invite people from their industry to chat. This way they meet their new clients. And don’t need to compete with all the rest of the design agencies that lead with polished portfolios.

#2 A platform niche

This is when you offer UI/UX design services to clients that want to build on top of a specific platform.
A platform is a piece of technology providing generic functionality that can be changed by the user to fit their needs. This could be all of the popular no-code platforms like Webflow and Squarespace but also operating systems like iOS, Android, or form factors like wearables and IoT.

Example: Juice Agency

Juice specializes in Webflow design and development. They use their own website to show what they can do for you as a client, making it almost unnecessary to review their portfolio.

#3 A problem niche

This is when you use your UI/UX design skill to solve a business problem.
In these cases, your skillset is almost irrelevant to the client. Because what you offer is a solution to a problem and you come to the solution, it is not that important if you can deliver results. A worthy problem could be turning visitors into paid customers, increasing the average time in-app per user, and reducing churn.

Example: UserOnBoard

UserOnBoard is one person — Samuel Hulick. And he is obsessed with “increasing the likelihood that new users become successful when adopting your product.” He wrote an entire book about onboarding — how about that? On his website, you are not going to see a list of skills or a portfolio with design. But what you will find are other artefacts of his knowledge on the topic. Teardowns of onboarding flows of popular products, training materials, articles, and podcasts.

I hope that got you excited about the idea of niching down.
If you know any other niche design businesses, you can send them my way to add to the collection.