The VC-backed gold rush is going strong here in the San Francisco Bay, and it’s only getting stronger.
Bay Area companies have raised an astounding $88 billion so far this year, and for the first time ever, the region may pass $100B by year’s end.
That’s crazy.
I’ve been designing software here for over 25 years, so let me tell you: the amount of activity lately has been bananas. We’ve seen a huge uptick in demand for UX design and consulting services. Everyone knows top-notch UX/UI design can make the difference between an everyday struggling startup and the next Carta, or Canva, or AirBnB, so everyone’s clamoring for talented UX/UI designers.
Problem is, finding these designers isn't easy. Tech giants like Google or Facebook snap up the bulk of the talent, and it can be tough to gauge which UX design agency here in the San Francisco Bay has the right expertise and skillset for your needs. That’s why I wrote this post.
To help you find the right UX design company, I’ve assembled a list of 6 of the best UX design agencies in San Francisco and the greater bay. I’ve broken these agencies down by their specialty and unique expertise. I’ve also included helpful questions, red flags & green lights, and a breakdown of how UX agency pricing works with a pricing analysis from over 60 Clutch reviews.
By the end of this post, my hope is for you to be equipped with at least one strong candidate studio to reach out to, as well as the information and perspective you need to properly evaluate which of them is right for you.
Okay, ready to get started?
If you’d like to jump to a specific section, use these links:
There are a lot of design agencies out there, but a solid 90% of them probably aren’t a good fit for your business.
Each agency has their strengths and weaknesses, different obsessions, passions, concerns and particular industry expertise. Agencies do their best work when projects align with their strengths, so it’s really important to make sure you pick the right one.
After all, picking the wrong UX design company can lead to some serious disappointment.
I read a terrible review on Clutch the other day. Client was originally quoted about $200k. After a series of major disappointments, the SF-based UX agency told them they’d need to pay $1 mil to finish the project. They sued the agency. The agency clapped back in their review. It was a miniature soap opera.
I’d like to never read one of those again, so without further ado, here’s the guide I put together to help you find the right UX design partner the first time around.
Many companies look for a San Francisco-based design consultancy because they or their investors want their product to look and feel like a “Silicon Valley Grade” product. I’ll leave it to a grad student to suss out the je ne sais quoi of Silicon Valley design, but I’ve heard it enough times to believe in it.
Finding the studio that’ll go the distance requires that you ask the right questions during the buying process—both of the agency and your team. In my 25+ years working in digital product design, I’ve learned to ask agencies certain questions and recognize certain traits. I’ve laid these out below.
Hiring a design agency only to have them pulled every which way by differing opinions is a great way to waste money on something that isn’t going to make anyone happy.
To avoid this, ask your internal stakeholders the following questions:
NOTE: A design consultancy should ask you these questions too, and maybe help deepen or tune your team's understanding of and alignment on their goals. But getting the ball rolling before speaking to design agencies can help speed things up, and avoid having your goals be "steered" too much by the sales process towards whatever a particular consultancy wants to sell.
Vetting a studio is partially about finding someone who works the way you want. If someone isn’t as responsive as you’d like, or seems too controlling, there’s another firm out there.
Ask these questions to vet digital agencies:
Do not hire a design studio without asking for references and following up with them. Of course, they’re sending you to select people, but you can still find out what kind of company they are to work with by asking the right questions.
Ask these questions to your studio’s references:
Picking the right studio is like going on a date. It’s not enough for a meeting to just go “okay”–you’ve gotta have compatibility and chemistry. Here are a few cues I generally consider “red flags” and “green lights.”
Red Flags (Don’t Hire An Agency If…)
Green Lights (It’s a Good Sign If…)
conversations.
This isn’t a ranked list–it’s a directory of agencies based on their unique specializations. If you’re gonna pick the best agency for your project, it helps to pick one that’s internally obsessed with the kind of thing you’re working on.
We’re living in a crazy time.
New technologies are emerging. Massive industries are getting disrupted. All of it’s happening faster each day. Disruptive unicorns are riding these changes to multi-billion dollar valuations, while slow-moving incumbents see their market share dwindle.
B2B companies know they need to innovate. They know great battles will be won or lost on user experience.
The problem?
Today’s B2B environments are so complex. Between market dynamics, organizational silos, legacy tech stacks, and disparate datasets, creating a delightful and cohesive user experience isn’t easy.
Which is why we founded DesignMap, a full-service UX design consultancy.
Since 2006, we’ve helped many of today’s top B2B companies harness complexity to build disruptive, delightful product experiences. We have a unique process in which we develop and align your organization around a 3-5 year product vision, and then facilitate execution with a suite of end-to-end UX design services.
Our process has powered many of our clients to successful fundraises and exits, including ExactTarget’s $2.5B acquisition by Salesforce, or Carta’s $500M series H.
If you’re a B2B designer, entrepreneur, or product leader (in California or otherwise), we’d love to hear from you.
Website: designmap.com
Industry Focus: B2B, FinTech, Healthcare
Most Notable Project Example: Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Carta Equity Management Platform
Fun Facts:
Frog is a huge company that does “do everything”—but their consumer and industrial design in particular is top notch, and they have some great designers (see for example this case study on a gaming system to help kids be more physically active). And they’re doing some really savvy thought leadership these days, such as this article on How Organizations Can Win on User Experience.
Website: frogdesign.com
Industry Focus: Consumer Products
Most Notable Project Example: Nestle
Fun Fact: Their thoughtful work on Redesigning the Pelvic Exam became semi-famous in designer circles, even though it was inspired internally by their own team, rather than created for a client.
Clay is a small company with an astonishing A-list of clients. You can see why if you peruse their gorgeous case studies for B2B and B2C mobile applications, from Coca-Cola to T-Mobile.
Website: clay.global
Industry Focus: Business and Financial Services
Most Notable Project Example: Slack
Fun Fact: Used Speedtest to gauge your WiFi speed in the last 8 years? Thank Clay for the lovely UX.
Usually when people are searching for “website design”, they need help with content-based sites (not web-based applications) built for marketing purposes. Designing these sites requires an intimate knowledge of digital marketing and content management systems. Eight25Media fits the bill on both fronts. With some presence in Silicon Valley as well as off-shore resources, they’re also quick and reasonably priced.
Website: eight25media.com
Industry Focus: Application Platforms
Most Notable Project Example: Hyundai North America
Fun Fact: Actually based in San Jose, Eight25Media was voted the #1 web design agency in Silicon Valley in 2017.
Over the years, we found that a lot of people searching for “interaction design” are actually looking for marketing rather than UX design. We had so many inquiries for B2B marketing & brand identity help that a few years back we launched a search to find a firm that we’d be happy and confident sending any of our friends to. We landed on Iron Creative.
Not only do they really know their stuff, but an hour with Matt and John, the Partners, is as entertaining and cathartic as an hour in a comedy club.
Website: ironcreative.com
Industry Focus: Brand Marketing
Most Notable Project Example: Levi Strauss & Co.
Fun Fact: Iron creative has been working with Levi’s for the last 10 years. If you’ve seen an ad for the iconic jeans in the last decade - you’ve seen Iron Creative’s brilliance in action.
Steve Portigal wrote the book on user research (several, in fact). He has single-handedly done more to contribute to the field than anyone else we know, and yet, somehow, you can still just talk to the guy. Crazy. Steve can both run in-depth research himself, and help build your research team’s chops.
Website: portigal.com
Industry Focus: Corporate Consulting
Most Notable Project Example: Chevron
Fun Fact: Steve wrote a fantastically entertaining book called Doorbells, Danger and Dead Batteries about when things go wrong in user research (and how to handle them!).
And now, let’s get to the very first question almost everyone has about hiring a design agency:
You’ll find a lot of people answering this question by giving you some hourly rate, but that doesn’t come anywhere near answering how much a UX design project will cost you. We took some time compiling pricing data from over 60 SF Clutch reviews and broke it down by Project Type.
Here are the results:
| Category | Avg. Cost | Median Cost | Project Cost Range | Avg. Project Length (Weeks) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| App Design | $187,500 | $100,000 | $10k - $1 million | 44 |
| Web Design | $137,970 | $80,000 | $10k - $1.5 million | 24 |
| Prototypes | $199,756 | $137,000 | $15k - $1.3 million | 32 |
| Software UI | $182,894 | $57,000 | $10k - $1.3 million | 30 |
| Research | $212,257 | $84,830 | $10k - $1.3 million | 38 |
| Strategy | $265,500 | $130,000 | $10k - $1.3 million | 39 |
If you spend any time with this table, you'll see that it’s actually not super easy to make sense of this information. There’s not a whole lot of difference in the averages, and there’s clearly a lot of variance in the data. For each category, we found examples of projects for as little as $10k, as well as examples over $1 million.
I think the real takeaway from this chart is this: when it comes to UX design agency pricing, it really depends on what you want. No two companies or products are the same. And for that matter, no two agencies are the same.
For instance, designing the Software user interface of a multi-application B2B ecosystem is going to cost way more than a simple two-screen SaaS product. So again, it really comes down to the specifications of the project.
Having said that, some additional insight into UX studio pricing may be helpful.
There are several different ways companies engage design agencies, but at the end of the day, most design pricing boils down to time and resources.
The main styles of engagement are:
- Staff Augmentation: Provides talented individuals to join the team like full-time employees. Costs are directly related to the size of the staff augmentation.
- Project-Based Work: This includes an up-front description of all services and a fixed fee. Additional costs or overages are covered in the Statement of Work (SOW).
- Agile engagements or Retainers: For long, ongoing or less-involved projects that do not require hitting date-based milestones. Cost is generally calculated by resources and number of sprints.
Regardless of engagement type, pricing will depend on the resources (i.e people) and time that are put into your project. This means multiplying three factors:
Junior visual designer or Principal UX designer? The Principal will cost significantly more.
Will the project take a quick 3 weeks, or will it be an entire quarter?
Will they be dedicating 100% of their time to this project, or just a fraction?
Even boiled down, this is still a little vague. So I’ve tried to put design pricing in as concrete terms as possible. Here are examples of three REAL projects of differing size, complete with price, timeline, and work performed (almost as it would appear on a SOW).
Project Scope: A network management startup needed help generating ideas and tackling a tough design challenge ahead of an upcoming engineering team hack-a-thon. We were tasked with acting as an outside facilitator for a traditional Design Sprint (have those been around long enough to be called “traditional” yet?), except that we spread it out across two weeks instead of one. This allowed their team to continue managing their workload as well as participate fully in the sprint. It also limited Zoom fatigue, which was important mid-pandemic.
Personnel Required: 1 Senior UX Designer (100%), 1 Director of Design (25%)
Timeline: 2.5 weeks
Cost: $13k
Work Performed:
Outputs:
Outcome:
Project Scope: A tech startup was developing an application that’d extract key data from emails and .PDFs and format it into structured outputs and insights for business analysts to consume. They were looking to design and build out a MVP that they’d use to sign a number of early-adopting customers before raising a Series A. We worked with their newly-hired Head of Product to design key workflows and screens before creating production-ready UI designs for buildout.
Personnel Required: 1 UX Designer (100% for whole engagement), 1 UX Lead (100% for Phase 1, 50% for Phase 2 & 3), Producer (25% for whole engagement).
Timeline: 6 weeks
Cost: $110k
Work Performed:
Outputs:
Outcomes:
Project Scope: An enterprise business needed help developing and prototyping a 2-3 year vision for maintaining their position as leader in the cloud-managed networking space.
Personnel Required: 1 UX Director or Lead (100%), 1 Senior UI Designer (100%), 1 Senior UX Designer (100%), 1 Producer (25%)
Cost Range: 500k
Timeline: 18 weeks
Work Performed:
Outputs:
Outcomes:
It may be helpful to be aware that any consultancy worth its salt is going to be talking to you about the value their work will contribute to your company, not the cost to them of providing the work. It’s like the old “handyman’s invoice” joke, $1 for tapping on the engine, $999 for the knowledge based on a lifetime of learning where to tap.
I’ve rarely seen these pricing agreements end up entirely based on value, but it’s a fair part of the conversation. After all, you don't want to work with a firm that doesn't know or care how their work will help make you and your company successful! Both you and they should know the value of what you’re trying to accomplish. But it's also fair for you to push back, to ask about how they do their pricing. If they really want to have some skin in the game, a conversation about equity (after a project or two so that you know one another) may be appropriate.
By now you should have a good idea about:
I think that’s really everything you need to be able to make the right decision and find the agency that’ll help you build a world class digital experience. Did I leave anything out? Anything particularly helpful here? Please drop me an email and let me know!