Studio Sungo

I've worked with Brian Alcorn at Studio Sungo for over twelve years. He has been on projects with me from two weeks long to two years. He was doing UX/UI/Human Factors work for some of the biggest startups in the Bay Area before most people knew what that was. His expertise is solving very complex UX issues, but not by drawing lots of boxes and circles (although he does that too). He has done many types of research for my projects, helped devise strategies and developed foundational things like taxonomies and information architecture. Brian used his background as a journalist to really dig in to understand every detail and to get inside the users' heads. I sat in on some of his user experience testing labs and learned more about our product from a couple of hours of his guided questions than we had in months of product "design".

Strengths: Brian (and his partner) are the kind of people who are becoming very rare: professionals who are plain honest but sharp and focused one hundred percent on quality. They don't promise quick results from a big bag of UX tricks. They do promise to understand a product or project down to it's marrow. And what they delivered always blew the doors off any quick fixes. Not to say they are slow, Brian has worked with me in an agile process, breaking pieces off and working in short sprints. He is fully capable of delivering much more content and design product than most teams can digest so he schedules delivery and checks in on the team progress regularly to see when they can handle more.

Needs to improve: Studio Sungo doesn't have a graphic design service. While they will manage the design process, including sourcing designers, they're not a one-stop shop. Their expertise is focused further upstream to make sure we don't waste a lot of money designing the wrong thing.