About the studio

Small team.
Serious work.

We're a research-led UX design studio that helps teams move from assumptions to understanding, and from understanding to work that performs.

Our story

We started because good research was treated as optional.

Synkora was founded in Ottawa on a single observation: most design work fails not because the designers aren't talented, but because the brief was wrong. The problem wasn't understood. The users weren't heard. The strategy wasn't grounded in anything real.

We built a studio that puts research at the centre of every engagement. Not as a phase you rush through to get to the real work. It is the foundation everything else is built on. Our clients get better outcomes because they understand what they're solving before they start designing it.

7 Projects delivered across 4 industries

8+ Years of combined UX research experience

100% Of projects grounded in primary research

3 Senior people on every engagement

The people

Gabriella Hong

Founder & Research Lead

Gabriella leads all research engagements. With a background in behavioural psychology and 7 years in product design, she has an unusual ability to get at what users actually mean, not just what they say.

Sander Fels-Leung

Co-founder & CTO

Sander architects the technical side of every engagement, from research tooling to design systems. He spent four years in management consulting before founding Synkora, and thinks in business outcomes first, code second.

Rashmi Sharma

UX Designer

Rashmi works across information architecture, visual design, and interaction details. She has an instinct for turning complex research findings into interfaces that feel simple, and a growing intolerance for design decisions that can't be justified.

How we think

Evidence before opinion

Every recommendation we make traces to a real user insight or a real business constraint. We don't guess, and we don't let clients guess either. If we don't have the evidence, we go and find it.

Clarity is the work

Making something feel simple is the hardest design problem. We don't hide complexity behind polished interfaces. We eliminate it. If users are confused, the design has failed, regardless of how it looks.

Honest over comfortable

We tell clients what they need to hear, not what they want to hear. This is occasionally uncomfortable and consistently why our engagements go well. A brief that's wrong at the start is expensive to fix at the end.

Built for month six

We design for how something will perform in six months, not how it will land in a client presentation. Short-term impressive and long-term effective are often different things. We choose the latter.

Small team.Serious work.