UX design services for climate and deep-tech startups. We help technical founding teams translate complex products into flows that buyers understand, cut onboarding friction, and shorten the path from first visit to first value. User research, wireframing, prototyping, and design systems built for products that operate in long sales cycles, multi-stakeholder environments, and technical domains like energy software, carbon accounting, and grid analytics.
UX services focused on shortening time-to-value, reducing onboarding friction, and making complex products easier for buyers to understand and adopt.
We map how your users actually move through your product — where they slow down, where they drop off, and what's costing you pilots and early contracts. Surveys, user interviews, usability sessions, and competitive studies feed into decisions that move adoption, not just improve aesthetics.
When buyers can't find what they need, they leave — or worse, they ask your sales team to walk them through it every time. We structure your product so the right information surfaces at the right moment, reducing support dependency and shortening the path to first value.
We move from rough flows to testable prototypes quickly so you can validate with real users or stakeholders before a single line of code is written. This cuts expensive development rework and keeps your team building what actually works, not what seemed logical in a kickoff meeting.
Friction that shows up in a usability session is friction that would have killed a pilot or stalled an enterprise deal. We test your product against the people who will buy or approve it, then prioritize what to fix based on what has the most impact on your sales cycle.
Before designing anything, we map the full user journey — including the procurement chain that climate, utility, and enterprise buyers actually go through. UX strategy that accounts for multi-stakeholder environments leads to products that close deals, not just ones that impress in demos.
As your product scales, inconsistency in the UI creates confusion for users and overhead for your dev team. We build modular design systems with a clear developer handoff so your engineering team can move without coming back for clarification as new features ship.
Your product may solve a real problem. But if buyers can't reach its value in the first few minutes, pilots stall, demos underperform, and enterprise deals drag longer than they should. Climate and energy software products often face this exact gap: the technology is solid, but the user flows weren't designed with the buyer's workflow, approval process, or technical context in mind. We work with technical founding teams to close that gap. From mapping where users drop off to rebuilding onboarding flows that match how buyers actually think, we help your product do more of the persuading before the sales call and reduce the explanatory burden on your team after it.
From seed-stage climate software teams to Series B energy platforms, we've helped technical founding teams close the gap between a product that works and a product that buyers can actually navigate.
"Working with What if Design has been transformative. Faster feature rollouts, reduced development costs, and a product experience that our users actually notice. They quickly understood our vision and offered proactive ideas we hadn't considered."
"Working with What if Design has been transformative. Faster feature rollouts, reduced development costs, and a product experience that our users actually notice. They quickly understood our vision and offered proactive ideas we hadn't considered."
"Working with What if Design has been transformative. Faster feature rollouts, reduced development costs, and a product experience that our users actually notice. They quickly understood our vision and offered proactive ideas we hadn't considered."
We work specifically with climate, energy, and deep-tech products. We understand long sales cycles, multi-stakeholder procurement, and why your buyer's workflow matters more than your feature list when it comes to UX.
We work specifically with climate, energy, and deep-tech products. No ramp-up time explaining what carbon accounting is, how grid analytics works, or why utility buyers move slowly. We already understand the landscape, which means we get to the real UX problems faster.
Most climate tech teams at the seed to Series B stage aren't ready to hire a full-time senior UX designer. We act as your embedded design partner: senior-level strategic thinking without the full-time hire cost or the management overhead that comes with a large agency.
Every design decision connects back to a user behavior we've observed or a drop-off point we've identified. We don't redesign based on internal preference. We design based on what your buyers and users actually do when they're in the product.
From research through wireframes to a dev-ready handoff, you work with one team across the full design cycle. No switching between a separate researcher, a visual designer, and a handoff specialist, and no gaps in context between phases.
Two co-founders with backgrounds in architecture, systems design, and scaling operations across multiple markets — with deep focus on climate and energy products.
Co-founder
Before co-founding What if Design, Akhila designed LEED-certified buildings and led urban interventions worth over $100M that shaped how millions of people move through and interact with public spaces. That work demanded thinking about systems at scale — not just how a single element performs, but how the whole functions under pressure. At What if Design, she applies that same lens to product UX. Before wireframing anything, she works through how a product functions across different user types, procurement stages, and technical constraints. She's worked on products from early MVP validation through growth-stage scaling, with a particular focus on climate and deep-tech tools where the user and the economic buyer are often two different people with very different mental models.
Co-founder
Before co-founding What if Design, Tejas drove business growth for OYO across three countries and ran training programs that reached over 1,700 people across India. That background — scaling operations, aligning teams, and moving fast in markets that don't sit still — shapes how he approaches design engagements. At What if Design, he leads the strategic side of client work: clarifying positioning and audience before anything is designed, and making sure every UX decision connects to a specific business outcome. He works closely with founders who need UX that holds up through long sales cycles and multi-stakeholder procurement, not just flows that look clean in a demo.
It depends on what needs fixing. A focused sprint on a specific onboarding flow or feature typically runs two to four weeks. A more comprehensive engagement covering research, full user flow redesign, and design system setup usually takes four to eight weeks. We scope based on where the friction is and what outcome you need, not a fixed package.
If users are taking longer than expected to reach value, or your onboarding hasn't kept pace with your product, it's worth a conversation.
Share where your product is and what's not working for your users. We'll follow up within 24 hours.
For immediate assistance, feel free to give us a direct call at You can also send us a quick email at team@whatifdesign.in
For immediate assistance, feel free to give us a direct call at You can also send us a quick email at team@whatifdesign.in