CodersPeak

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the Co-Founder of a human resources company, a simple feedback tool that uses neuroscience to build high performing and connected teams.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire CodersPeak, and what were your goals?

We needed a team to help us bring our vision to life. We brought them onboard as a group of individuals that would essentially be part of our technology team. Our goal still remains to deliver a product that enhances the way we work together through enabling a better understanding of emotion and the role it plays in our behaviour.

SOLUTION

How did you select CodersPeak and what were the deciding factors?

They had impressed us on a previous job and that made it easy to bring them across to work on this.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

Our work with the team is ongoing and includes everything from front-end, back-end, infrastructure, QA, project management and more. The team are highly skilled and make it a joy to work with them.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

We have a team of around 12 working for us, led by a senior tech lead and PM, full-stack developers, front-end, back-end, QA and mobile developers.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

Through ongoing refinement of the way we work together we work fast and output a huge amount for the relatively small team that we are.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timelines.

The main tools we use are Slack to communicate and Jira to manage our tasks. We have an open relationship whereby we run through releases ahead of time to review the roadmap and establish what will go into the coming sprints and where things need to change.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

I feel like we are one team. They challenge me, I challenge them. We celebrate our success together. This is no ordinary company.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

We have a very open dialogue and approach to how we improve things together. That didn't happen overnight but now we are there I am very grateful.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

We are an award-winning product design firm that specializes in electronic product design and engineering for wearables, electronics, bioscience, and healthcare companies. Our focus is on making our clients’ technology innovations useful and meaningful for their customers. We were founded in 2002, and have 12-15 employees with a mix of specialized knowledge in product development, industrial design, mechanical engineering, UX, human factors, material selection and global manufacturing. I am an Industrial Design Lead and have been with the company since 2012.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire CodersPeak?

We have extensive knowledge of physical product design, but as more products are becoming more integrated with technology and software, we have started to expand our design process to include UX design. While we have the capabilities to design a good user experience, we do not employ software developers to implement our vision. We hired CodersPeak initially to help us create an interactive front-end demo of an operator interface we had designed for a Supercomputer. Later, we worked with CodersPeak again to help take our UX design for a remote, web-based version of this interface (with some additional management tools) and develop it into a working site that tied into our Client's backend API.

What were your goals for this project?

For this project, our client had already begun creating a backend API, and we had designed a UX to tie into it. Our main goal was to have CodersPeak recreate our visual design intent in a way that would be coded to connect with the backend API. They supplied Javascript/HTML/CSS and tied into the backend with JSON.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

CodersPeak was recommended to us by a UX designer we were working with on a past project. We had initially hired a different development team that we were not meshing with at all, was difficult to manage, and slow due to many levels of bureaucracy and language barriers. After our first meeting with Tom Brunarski at CodersPeak, we were immediately reassured that he understood what we needed help with. Not only that, but he was also asking good, smart questions. He understood our way of thinking and working, and CodersPeak has been our go-to vendor for software development since.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

For both related projects, our team had already completed a flow and visual design for what the final interfaces needed to look like, and function. One interface involved about eight pages of densely populated graphics and text that was to be displayed to a machine operator, giving them up-to-date information about what was happening inside the machine. Since this machine was to be debuted at a tradeshow, we needed an interactive 'demo' version of what the final interface would behave like for users to try out. CodersPeak took our Adobe XD designs, and helped us turn them into a 4K interactive touch-screen interface that ran on multiple screens at the show. Later, as an extention of this project, CodersPeak helped us continue that work. We had designed a remote access web-version of the interface, along with a whole suite of additional features one might use to manage a fleet of machines. CodersPeak again helped us turn our vision into a pixel-perfect web interface that tied in with our Client's backend API.

What was the team composition?

Our team consisted of two UX designers with very limited knowledge of coding. We provided the vision and guidance for how things should behave and look. Our client, who was providing the backend API, had two people who were more familiar with networking and coding. They worked with CodersPeak more on the technical level, tying their work together. With CodersPeak, we primarily interfaced with one person (Tom) although I believe there were 2-4 other members on his team who we occasionally interacted with via Jira.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?

Working on two separate projects with CodersPeak has expanded the capabilities of our company. We can now confidently say that we offer a complete UX / UI design solution because we can take our vision and, working with CodersPeak, turn it into something real. This was something we couldn't do in the past, without relying on our client's own internal dev teams, or looking for outside teams that we had had various degrees of success working with.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

We interfaced almost exclusively with one project manager via weekly meetings including all 3 parties. Mixer, our client, and CodersPeak. Outside of those meetings, most communication took place via e-mail or over Slack for quick questions. To-do items were submitted via Jira tickets, and occasionally specific questions from CodersPeak developers were asked to the design team via Jira as well. This was very effective and efficient, especially considering that in some cases, the design was not 100% complete, and we needed to prioritize what was finished first.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

CodersPeak is smart, fast, and detail-oriented. The reason we will continue working with them is that they really understand our thought process and work in a similar way to how we like to work. They ask good questions, raise valid concerns, and suggest improvements when they see something that might work better. They are friendly, polite, and always a pleasure to work with, and that comes through in each interaction. Even though we're on different continents, it often feels like they could be working alongside us in our studio.

Are there any areas for improvement?

From our perspective, there is very little they need to improve. We like that this team is nimble and open to new ideas, even if they occur mid-project. Sometimes our clients would like a more detailed breakdown of the costs involved when they see a quote from CodersPeak, but other than that, this company is one of our favorite vendors to work with.