Consulting Services

We offer a number of service options and engagement models to meet the needs of your business.

Full Service Solutions

• End-to-end Application Development

  Need a stand-alone, mobile, or web application built? We can take your concept all the way to a finished product. Our experts can start as early in the development process as requirements gathering and market research, move on to functional and user interface design, provide user experience validation through usability research and testing, architect the technical framework of your product, implement and test it. Our goal is to deliver high quality, usable software that meets your business needs and satisfies your users.

• Website Design and Development

  Does your business need a web presence, or are you looking to overhaul an existing website? Whether you are starting from scratch or adding on to a site with an established design style guide, our consultants will work with you to determine the most effective ways to communicate with your customers through your website. We can build your website using your existing website technology, or start from the ground up to select an implementation technology that best fits your needs, as well as providing meaningful metrics so you can track the effectiveness of your site over time.

Targeted Solutions

• Market Research and Business Intelligence

  More often than not, figuring out what to build is the most important step in your project. Due to the virtual nature of software products, there are nearly limitless ways to build a high quality piece of software. But that matters little if users don't need or want it. Let us help you assess your customers' needs so that your next project is a hit.

• User Experience Design

  Our expert designer will approach the design of your project with both business and user requirements in mind, as well as any existing technical constraints, to produce a highly functional information architecture, interaction model, and user interface design. We can render our designs as functional wireframes, or as pixel-perfect visual mockups ready for implementation. Need a visual style guide created to unify the design of your applications or website? We've got you covered.

• Usability Research

  In today's competitive marketplace, having the lowest price or the biggest feature set is not necessarily enough to ensure success. If users cannot easily figure out how to operate your application, or access your service or website to get the value they are looking for, many will look elsewhere. Want to find out for sure if users are going to be able to easily navigate your new design before spending time and money to potentially build the wrong thing? Or perhaps you have a piece of software or a website already deployed and would like to get an understanding of how it could be improved from a user's perspective for your next revision. Either way, we can help with proven user research tools and methodologies.

• Systems and Application Architecture

  In the creation of any complex software application, a solid software architecture, conceived and validated before production coding begins is a key to success. We have the experience to help ensure your project's implementation goes smoothly and does not end up requiring a major rework in the middle of coding, whether you are creating a self-contained application or a large distributed system operating on a service oriented architecture.

• Software Engineering

  At Counting Stick Software, we take pride in our wide-ranging software engineering skill set. Whether you are building for the desktop, the web, or mobile devices, we can help. We have decades of experience building complex, high performing software for many different systems and technologies, across a wide range of domains. We are equally at home building from scratch or refactoring and enhancing an existing system. If you can imagine it, we can help you build it.

Engagement Models

• Fixed Price Consulting

  The fixed price model is good for self contained projects whose scope is well defined. In these circumstances, we can estimate the work required and quote you a fixed price which you will be billed upon completion of the project or at agreed-upon milestones. Note that once the requirements and scope of a fixed price project are agreed upon, any desired change in scope or requirements will require a re-estimation of work and potentially an adjustment in the price.

• Hourly Consulting

  In an hourly model, we bill you for the actual time spent working at a contracted hourly rate. This model is good for projects whose scope is not so well-defined, or in a situation where you would like to retain our services and have our consultants integrate with your existing development team to work on a variety of projects.