How We Do It. Strategy, Design, Development and Delivery.
Everything you need from one partner.
The elements of creating incredible digital experiences. We know. We do it all and we’ve done it over 500 times for companies big and small. We're an integrated, collaborative team who will combine our passion and experience with your domain expertise to deliver a truly great product, together. Whether you’re just at the idea stage or version four of your product, we know how to work with you and your team to deliver an incredible experience.
Strategy
Big picture thinking, or as we like to call it—The Solution Design. What problems are you trying to solve? Customer acquisition? Engaged adoption? How does technology fit in to the solution? Who are your users? How can we motivate them to love your product? These are the kinds of questions we work with you to answer, the kinds of questions that ultimately set the stage for an incredible experience.
To establish a vision together, we combine market & ethnographic research with business process mapping to establish the framework of the experience. You'll find us crawling in attics, walking hospital floors, or traveling to retail stores.
We want to understand the natural deployment environment for the experience. We then bring this research to life by applying Motivational Design patterns and other behavioral principles in the form of "spotlight" interface design concepts to visualize the key areas of the experience.
Already done the research before talking to us? Many of our customers have and that works for us too. We’ll quickly review and validate the research so we can move to designing an incredible experience.
Design
With the big picture thinking understood and the strategic direction mapped out, we move to the next step in our iterative process – Interface Design. You’ve come to Cynergy because you want an incredible experience. Great design is what we do but design at Cynergy is much more than just pretty pictures—it’s solving real business challenges with the appropriate use of workflow, motion, gestures, usability, branding, typography, color, and style all in the context of the targeted delivery medium and devices. It's about bringing your experience to life. It's Design with a capital "D."
Our design process, LookFirst, is both iterative and collaborative. Great design comes from iteration—no big secret there but all too often the collaborative element is left out and it’s critical. We’re not naïve and we’re not arrogant—we know you know your business better than we do. Yes, we certainly know Design but it’s the marrying of your deep knowledge of your business with our expertise in Design that brings about incredible experiences.
You are critical to our success. Just want us to read your mind? No thanks. We know that doesn’t work and we will pass. We know that you are a critical part of the experience and this is why we stress face-to-face kickoff meetings, frequent iterations of wireframes and high-fidelity designs and a constant feedback loop.
When you’ve deployed over 500 incredible experiences, you come to understand a few things and one of those important things is that Design without the oversight of Technology is a recipe for disaster. The creativity and uniqueness across our experiences are anchored by what's plausible—sanity checking design along the way with technical expertise to ensure that your incredible experience can be delivered on time and within your budget. Agencies without a technology background cannot do this and the all-too-common result is a dumbed down experience or, even worse, a design that never gets implemented. Incredible experiences come to life when you bring together design and technology. This is the core of our being.
Development
Cynergy's roots are in best-of-breed engineering. We were founded as a development shop over 15 years ago and it remains a core part of our DNA even as our business has evolved to provide more comprehensive services to our customers. After all, an incredible experience is as much about performance and responsiveness as it is the look and feel.
Technology Agnostic. We believe, religiously, in delivering the right experience for the right person on the right device but that’s where our religion ends. We will work with you to determine the best technology for your experience, not simply the technology we happen to know. Our size, breadth and obsessive R&D culture allow us to offer mastery across every major technology stack of the day including HTML5, iOS (iPhone/iPad), Android, Silverlight, Flex and even emerging technologies such as DirectUI on the new Windows 8 platform. If it has a screen, you can bet we’ve deployed incredible experiences to it and that means you won’t be limited when you work with us.
Experienced, Integrated Teams. Our development teams are always led by a Technical Lead, a senior application architect/lead developer on your project who possesses no less than seven to ten years of real-world experience shipping real experiences. They are responsible for managing our team so that you only have to deal with one technical point-of-contact and they take full accountability for the work the rest of the team is doing. The Technical Lead works closely with the User Experience Lead, who stays engaged throughout development to ensure that the coded experience maintains strict fidelity with the designs, as well as a Delivery Manager responsible for monitoring the timeline and budget like a hawk. This project management structure allows each resource to focus on their area of expertise while providing you with transparency throughout.
Using the milestone plan delivered as an output of our Solution and Interface Design Phase, development is segmented into achievable sprints, as it's our goal to deliver builds for your review early and often so that you have an unbiased pulse on our progress. By not waiting until the very end of development to see the experience come to life for the first time, you have further peace of mind that the experience will ship on time and within budget.
HTML5iPHONEiPADANDROIDPHONEGAPPHONE 8ADOBE FLEXWPFSILVERLIGHTDelivery
We don't just focus on designing and developing experiences—we focus on actually shipping them and doing so with a superior level of quality. We don't put "Beta" labels on our experiences to hide behind shoddy workmanship. Our job is not finished just because our development team has reached their final milestone. At Cynergy, "Delivery" means ensuring that the experience is polished, stable, functions as intended, and is ready for production release. Period.
Our Delivery process is structured to be flexible to your needs. We can manage the end-to-end responsibilities of Q&D with a pure Cynergy team or we can incorporate your internal QA staff and experts into the Cynergy team. Should Cynergy manage the Quality Assurance (QA), we provide dedicated testing resources throughout development and the final QA period. We believe that milestone-based testing throughout the development phase to flush out the component- and module-level issues allows the final, dedicated QA period to focus on cross-module integration testing and overall platform hardening. This alleviates stress and pressures on crunched timelines and ensures that no corners are cut as a result.
Our QA testers write all functional test scripts based on the use cases outlined during the discovery analysis and they are responsible for regularly testing the builds and filing defects for the team to address. We also use automated test frameworks to handle redundant tasks and find efficiencies in the timeline.
When complete and you have accepted the experience, your experience is considered Delivered and ready for deployment.