Merixstudio

Genuine Impact’s founders describe their service as ”the world's first financial terminal, created to empower DIY investors”. The service supports individual investors in their investment decision processes by measuring the risks associated with an investment in specific values. With several charts, biases and plenty of data delivered through the application, the user is allowed to perform quicker and more valid decisions while investing. Thanks to a perfect combination of technical acumen with risk-management and stock exchange related expertise, this fintech application makes investment easier for individuals. 

Genuine Impact founders were on a lookout for an experienced product design company to finish their efforts leading towards the MVP release.

The scope of work included:

• Providing an entire branding design for a Fintech company operating in a competitive environment
• Delivering intuitive and esthetic views and feature designs displaying several biases, charts, and statistics
• Introducing best business practices and requirements in design processes
• Anticipating specific guidelines and complex requirements of a highly specialized documentation

More information about the process & solution: 

www.merixstudio.com/work/GenuineImpact

The product design workshop at Merixstudio is an essential step in the custom software development process and a very good way of starting the product development process. Every product design workshop session is different and we always adapt its plan to the client’s needs. The maturity level of your project doesn’t matter here. Product design workshops at Merixstudio will be beneficial for both - new projects and ideas, where assumptions are not clear yet but also for already designed products that need revision and improvement.

Each product design workshop session consists of doing sketches and mobile or web application mockups, brainstorming and focusing on the business goals or the analysis of user flow. One of the main advantages of participating in product design workshops is time and money savings. Such a session is a crucial way of understanding the application and the users’ needs.

Product Design workshops are also a good opportunity to know the multidisciplinary team that will be working on your project. The engineering team always takes part in it - you’ll have the frontend and backend developers that are able to advise and present a more technical point of view on your project. Of course, the product design team with UI and UX designers is also present at the workshop. The project manager role is also essential here as you will stay in contact with him/her during the whole product development process. Also for us, it is very important to work in multidisciplinary teams. That way we can look at the project from different perspectives and be more creative. Additionally heaving a tech person on the product design workshop will give us insight on how those features will be developed and how much effort will it take.

Moneyfarm’s mission is to give their customers the best solutions and support to protect and grow their wealth through time. They believe that everyone should be able to protect, promote and pursue his/ her wealth, without having to worry about it. We were very happy to help them in spreading this mission and bringing value to the customers.

There have been over 9-months of close cooperation between Moneyfarm and Merixstudio’s React development team. We kicked off the project with a few day onboarding processes in their London headquarters where we had a chance to meet the team in person and learn the project’s specifics.

More details about the process & solution:

www.merixstudio.com/work/Moneyfarm

Autium is a UK-based tech startup that provides high-quality fleet management software to corporate entities worldwide. Their key product is a SaaS platform, consisting of a web panel and cross-platform app, designed to help vehicle fleet managers process insurance claims quickly and accurately. It also helps drivers report to managers the details of the accidents, thanks to the app installed on their mobile phones. The client’s vision is to be the leading automated incident management and notification technology solution.

Prior to the cooperation with Merixstudio, Autium founders had problems with building performant and scalable MVP with other developers, thus they looked for a trustworthy and competent tech partner who could: 

• understand their product and start a project from scratch, ASAP,
• develop a web-based software solution and a mobile app to establish an MVP quickly so that Autium founders could start looking for more investors and take the project to the next stage,
• take care of the full product design process,
• provide Autium clients with real-time analytics, advanced stats and structured data,
• develop the product after the launch.

As the project’s budget and deadline were tight, we had to look for an optimal technology mix to deliver the best product in the shortest possible time.

More details about the process & solution: 

www.merixstudio.com/work/Autium

SportsHi React Native mobile app is a great example of a lifestyle-driven business concept. Founded by an after-hour rugby coach living in New York, the application allows the users (Coaches and Players) to schedule their training sessions and games as well as communicate with each other. This project is also a great example of both the lean approach and agile followed development.

App founders were managing the project from their New York-based headquarters, while the development took place mainly in Merixstudio’s office in Poznań, Poland. The 6-hours difference was easily overcome by planning weekly meetups during East Coast morning hours. The daily communication was crucial, as the founding team consisted of a CTO (tech lead), who was collaborating with our Frontend, Backend, and Quality Assurance specialists. In addition to that, the UX designer was overseeing the implementation of the design from the office located in the Big Apple.

More details about the process & solution:

www.merixstudio.com/work/SportsHi

Burrow is the US-based, B2C e-commerce company which produces and distributes bespoke easy to build uncompromising furniture. Its mission is to create products for the way people actually live their lives. Burrow was named one of the 10 most innovative retail brands in the world by Fast Company, and one of their luxury sofas was recognized as one of the 50 best inventions of the year by TIME. This Y Combinator seeded company is growing rapidly within the near future with expansion across borders, the sky seems to be the limit.

Burrow had a strict product expansion roadmap, which meant scaling up development and the team. As recruitment locally is usually a long and strenuous process, the client sought to outsource a skilled team to ramp up the development while retaining standards. 

Main challenges we were faced with:

• to help Burrow to scale up the development and team quickly,
• to engage the best engineers with specific competencies to extend the client’s in-house team,
• to significantly increase the performance of the application,
• to contribute to the launch of the application,
• to facilitate the maintenance of the codebase.

The key factors were and still are to ensure front-end design requirements are met, without impacting performance.

More details about the process & solution: 

www.merixstudio.com/work/Burrow

Merixstudio was responsible for developing the project from scratch covering full-fledged web development consultancy, quality assurance, software development and design services. One of the main milestones to achieve were: creating a full design for the website, implementing a bot-resistant voting system for schools (one of the ways to achieve it was integration with an SMS gateway for increased verification), allowing schools to submit applications via a website, creating a back-office panel for managing applications and voting process.

It’s worth mentioning that Szkoła Małego Inżyniera is just one of many projects that Volkswagen decided to develop with Merixstudio during our longstanding collaboration. There were, among others, websites supporting their CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) programmes such as “Niebieskie Granty” - a website for raising ecological awareness in local communities including advanced implementations of JavaScript, Ajax and CSS3, Google Maps API and Drupal CMS. or “Mini Handball” - a website for promoting a healthy lifestyle and physical activity with Drupal CMS and beautiful front-end JavaScript animations.

We supported The Juilliard School in building and launching an advanced Recital Management System (RMS), which helps students and school staff organize recitals. Our role involved backend (Django) and front-end coding. In the beginning, front-end was based on the Metronic theme, but later during the project, we created new designs of RMS and implemented it into the application. Our work in the project included integrations with external services such as Panopto (using SOAP-based integration), which is a system for scheduling recital recordings, integration of Colleague system (REST API), and integration with Performance Event Calendar previously created by us before. We also developed a canvas-based Stage Composer application, which allows students to use front-end tool to create stage setup - either using one of the predefined settings or custom adjusted ones. The final product requires the input of data such as selection of the stage that students wish to perform on, when and what time of day they want to do it, what instrument are they playing and how exactly the scene is supposed to look (for the last option we are creating the HTML5 based Stage Composer).  The system was also equipped with an internal notification system for students and teachers, tool to create dynamic forms and other mechanisms meant to simplify the whole process of preparing a recital. Full case study: https://www.merixstudio.com/work/juilliard-rms/

BrandSync is a cloud-based, PIM (Product Information Management) solution dedicated to both e-commerce and brick and mortar industries -  retailers and producers that covers three major problematic aspects of distribution: gathering and processing products’ data, standardisation and unification of data for all of supply chain participants, and further data circulation (both internal and external). 

The solution was a dedicated application that enables users to input to the database a precise description of their products. Combined with a great number of products in the base, it allows for a very expanded data exchange between the subjects within the supply chain. 

One of the major challenges was to combine simplicity with flexibility and create as user-friendly tools as possible. The final product has a clear, intuitive interface with custom-made designs that provides the variety of functionalities and makes the high volume data management easy and effective. 

Our technology stack of choice was: Angular, Django (the Python framework), and PostgreSQL. The whole app is hosted on AWS. Additional services and tools we’ve used include: RabbitMQ and Celery, Redis and Elastic. For CI/CD (Continuous Development/Continuous Integration) purposes, we’ve used Docker and Jenkins.

Full portfolio: http://bit.ly/BrandsyncClutch

Unibo is a powerful yet user-friendly system for increasing player engagement and retention with a single unified back office. For the former, it makes the e-gaming experience more appealing. For the latter, Unibo is a complex tool for speeding up everyday work and enabling management of complex campaigns.

The scope of our work included:

• helping the client validate their idea and suggesting appropriate tech solutions during the workshop,

• delivering a good UX and providing initial UI of the product,

• building backend and frontend of the platform,

• ensuring the smooth processing of large amounts of data.

Our cooperation began with an intense product design workshop attended by Unibo’s C-level executives and our team. We paid special attention to the business context and problems to be solved by the product. This part was crucial to the project’s success due to our limited experience in the online gaming industry.  To ensure the highest quality of cooperation, we composed a versatile team of IT specialists, including developers, designers, QA specialists, and a PM.

More information about the process & solution: 

https://www.merixstudio.com/work/unibo/

The whole over one-year long collaboration was based on a partnership between two teams: Merixstudio’s Angular developers from Poznan, Poland and the core client’s team from Bratislava, Slovakia. We kicked off the project with a 4-day onboarding session in the client’s headquarters where we had a chance to meet the team in person and learn the project’s specifics.

Merixstudio’s team was in charge of a new version of country sites for the company. In greater detail, we were responsible for both the sales pages (available for all users) and transaction pages (available for authorized users only). On the country sites, users can apply for different types of financial products (particular products are dependant on the specific country’s offer), for example, credit line, microloan, prime loan. The transaction part allows a user to manage his product, cover invoices and track cash flow. The underlying assumption was to prepare a generic solution which allows us to create sites that are country-specific. To begin with, we worked on 3 country versions i.e. for Latvia, New Zealand, and Sweden. They scaled up regularly to hit 23 countries.

The whole application heavily relies on the microservice architecture written in Java. Merixstudio’s expert developers to a great extent dealt specifically with API Gateway (used NestJS to build it)  providing a single, unified API entry point across numerous internal APIs.

This was fully remote cooperation put in the framework of a Scrum-driven development.

Merixstudio’s team was responsible for timely implementation of a clear-cut scope that mainly boiled down to empowering users to automate email marketing by generating custom forms and pages. Taking into consideration the scale and complexity of the whole application as well as a number of inherent dependencies, the team decided to pay a special focus on the testing process and to double QA efforts. Except for unit tests by the dev team, this mainly referred to QA functional testing i.e. writing numerous test cases and performing intensive manual testing, automated functional testing with WebdriverIO, JavaScript, Mocha, Chai as well as functional API testing with Postman.

The team headcount varied from 7 to 10 people in its peak time and the composition included scrum master, UX designer, QA specialists, front-end and back-end engineers. The team functioned as an independent and self-managing unit, however, maintained collaboration with the other stakeholders located in both Europe and India which make them successfully handle the workflow with an almost 5-hour time zone difference. The whole development was supported by an agile methodology incorporating Scrum practices and adjusting them to the current project needs.

Selfmade Energy is a Django-powered comparison service that allows homeowners to find out which solar system installers boast the most competitive offers in their region. After providing basic information about their household, e.g. ZIP code or roof size, the user receives offers from three photovoltaics (PV) system installers and chooses the vendor that suits their needs best. 

Dr. Tim Rosengart, the founder of a Berlin-based startup, was looking for a tech partner who would help him disrupt the local renewable energy market. As Germany is leaving the fossil-nuclear age behind, paving the way for photovoltaics (PV) will play a central role in a future shaped by sustainable power production. In order to cover all energy needs from renewable energies, a massive expansion of the installed PV power is necessary.  Dr. Tim Rosengart wished to show the German citizens that the installation of the solar panels – although often perceived as expensive – can lead to significant savings in the long run. 

Being a proactive member of the Berlin startup ecosystem, Merixstudio approached Dr. Rosengart offering to bring his idea to life with tech expertise, ownership, and outstanding design skills. 

The scope of our work included:

• suggesting best tech stack choices based on the client’s expectations and prospective users’ needs
• building backend and frontend of the web application
• delivering clean and intuitive designs
• providing branding design for a startup whose aim was to disrupt the renewable energy market in Germany

More information about the process & solution: 

www.merixstudio.com/work/Selfmade-Energy

bookingkit is one of the leading Berlin-based companies from the leisure industry, highly recognized in the sector. The company operates as a neutral Global Distribution System (GDS) to provide travel agencies and marketing networks access to tours and activities in the form of a digital inventory. It is also a web-based and integrated solution (software as a service) for providers of tours and activities.

We were approached with an idea depicting how they would like to change their platform’s architecture to enable scaling it even further. The chosen solution is based on sharding - creating a number of instances sharing the same codebase but with different datasets derived from the source and divided by the chosen factor.

Such an approach, similarly to Microservice architecture, creates certain challenges like:

• providing API access allowing data consumption, 
• creation across all the instances like it would be a single application.

That can be achieved for instance by creating an API gateway in front of the application instances, and that is what we aimed for.

In addition, a solution had to:

• meet certain performance criteria in terms of response speed,
• be flexible to allow for further development of the main application, 
• scalable to support the growth of the user base and possibly the number of instances.

All of this has to be highly available - bookingkit is working with demanding partners such as Trip Advisor or Get Your Guide, which means their services have to be available 24/7.

This company is a USA-based insurance agency focusing on cooperation with a few specific industries, e.g., trucking. Providing high-quality business products to a narrow and sometimes niche group of enterprises prompted them to adjust their internal processes. Still, off-the-shelf automation tools proved to be too general and rigid to use. 

And although the product was to improve their daily work, it quickly became a blocker for the company to grow. The application was slow, too complicated, many operations had to be done manually, and the technologies used were outdated. And most importantly, the learning curve for both new employees and users was steep and required a lot of onboarding time. The overall user experience of the application was poor.

To ensure the company's further development, they were on the lookout for a trustworthy tech partner who will:

• share ownership of the product's design and implementation roadmap,
• rewrite the legacy system (both backend and frontend),
• revise the way their business processes and operations are reflected in it, 
• make sure the new tech stack is modern and scalable,
• build a long term relationship for maintenance after the project is done.

More information about the process & solution: 

www.merixstudio.com/work/BusinessInsuranceApp

Tourism & accommodation is one of the fastest-growing industries in the world. The increasing demand for unforgettable experiences results in solutions that allow users to gain better access to attractions and activities offered by the providers. That’s why one of our UK-based clients came to us with a plan to develop a modern, UX-friendly mobile app for luxurious Spa enthusiasts, looking for relaxation at one of the best resorts in England. 

The specifics of such a modern product came with the following issues to solve:

• choosing the appropriate tech stack for front-end and back-end development,
• enabling a comfortable and intuitive booking of many services like massages, facials as well as rooms and other attractions via mobile app,
• anticipating the modern standards of the wellness experience.

The project has been preceded with a remote scoping session, during which the client introduced our full-stack team (frontend, backend, quality assurance, project management) to the requirements, graphical assets, timelines, and roles.  Rough deadline stimulated both teams to introduce the best agile practices, and maintain constant communication using Slack, Jira, and Google Hangouts. With several dependencies, every team member was highly involved to overcome technological challenges and the effectiveness has been secured by an experienced project manager.

Due to tight deadlines, Merixstudio software development team has been urged to provide a very detailed estimation to confirm the ability of on-time delivery. Both parties agreed that this particular endeavor requires a higher team capacity than recommended for projects of this size. 

Merixstudio has integrated three 3rd party APIs during the process, performed Behaviour Driven Development, and series of API tests. The designs have been delivered by our partner, although dedicated User Experience designer supervised the user flows and supported the engineering team evaluating each view, feature and user flow.

A combination of the tourism industry expertise and most modern engineering delivered a future-proof mobile app for streamlining the process of booking deluxe services of UK-based resort.

Netvico is a Stuttgart-based, boutique digital agency delivering top-notch solutions for all kind of industries and branches. Their portfolio includes highly tailored work for such recognizable clients like Volvo, IBM, Adidas, Porsche, Schwerin, and DHL.

Their core service, PlayEverywhere is a Digital Signage/Digital out of Home content management system (CMS). It is successfully introduced in various locations, such as shopping malls, industrial plants, office spaces, and even ski resorts. The service is suitable for different kinds of users - shift managers, store supervisors, PR & marketing specialists to maintain daily based communication. PlayEverywhere allows them to display Corporate Identity (CI), advertisement and other interactive content on various types of screens, including 4k monitors. All kinds of the audience may benefit from Netvico’s service; industrial workers, shoppers, tourists, and office workers. 

Main challenges to overcome:

• from a corporate perspective, the main difficulty was related to Netvico’s demand for top-quality talent. Netvico was on a lookout for a team of experts who will learn their business core and thus continue further development of the CMS, including creating new features. 
• the second aspect of work was caused by business circumstances and engineering. Netvico provides it’s services for different kinds of clients, using various types of screens and monitors in different contexts. Some of them are interactive and required WebSockets to maintain communication between the content provider and the final user via smartphones.

Netvico also offers solutions for touchscreens and dynamic environments, like industrial plants, where the contents need to be adjusted several times during the day. PlayEverywhere has to anticipate all these conditions, hence the demand for intuitive navigation best performance.

Merixstudio’s involvement boiled down to two key stages namely onboarding and development. Since we dealt with a legacy project, we agreed to kick-off the project with a 2-week pre-development phase during which the team got familiarised with the project’s priorities and codebase, drew up a plan (research, scope, estimates) for integration with Yardi - a 3rd party property management software, and scoped out a new application’s flow that needed refreshments and better UX. Afterwards, we scaled up a dedicated software team so that we could efficiently develop new features. The key milestones were: building out a new application flow based on the designs delivered by the client and integrating the application with 3rd party Plaid that analyses bank deposits to validate your users’ income and employer information. These were subject to change and adjustments which made us employ a fair amount of flexibility throughout the development.

We followed the Scrum methodology with 2-week sprints that served as a framework for the delivery of new features. Although, the challenging time zone difference, we kept close and transparent communication with Snappt’s US-based stakeholders (e.g. thanks to the weekly planning sessions on the videocon with clients, daily updates on a project’s Slack channel, Jira).

The long-term partnership with Snappt has been based on different degrees of collaboration - since the project’s start, there were various full-time jobs intermingled by less intensive maintenance time.

We improved the usability and findability of data by redesigning Information Architecture and simplifying user paths. The whole process was initiated by UX audit that identified the specific areas that needed refinement. This gave us a fair ground for working on accurate planning and execution of product development - this, however, was shaped with a client during online Product Design Workshops. During 3 online sessions, we discussed: the value proposition, main assumptions, and priorities for development, re-definition of target users, Information Architecture structure, the scope of features to be developed, and technology and solutions that will be used. The key objectives were to increase findability, usability, increase esthetics, decreasing bugs and not working features.

We proceeded with an intensive iterative wireframing of the new solution in a multidisciplinary team of UX, PM, and Python developer so that the feedback loop is shortened and the solution is robust from the early stages. The wireframes were eventually implemented with customized Material Design which let us speed up the process. Other goals to achieve were integration with Pacer, an electronic public access service of United States federal court records, to automatically download documents and introducing the mobile version of the app. During the development, we followed Scrum practices and organized work in one-week sprints that served as a framework for delivery of the new features. 

Studybee is a  Sweden-based startup that builds a lightweight learning management system for both teachers and students. It enables teachers to grade students' assignments and assess students' progress directly in Google Classroom where the actual learning takes place. This decreases administration job for teachers and, as a result, gives them more time for teaching. Also, students can view assessments and receive feedback in Google Classroom.

Merixstudio’s key responsibilities were building an A-to-Z Chrome extension from scratch, implementing a browser-based logging functionality, fetching data from Google Classroom API, building a dedicated admin panel using out-of-the-box Django Suit, defining different grades’ types, managing grades (thanks to an advanced digital class register), Google Cloud integration.

We also executed UI/GUI tests, functional tests, and E2E tests. We wrote test cases, and we tried to cover all the scenarios including positive and failure path and boundary cases. We wanted to be sure that the extension was working as expected and according to the specific requirement.

The project boiled down to creating a proof of concept version (POC) of the Python application in order to demonstrate its feasibility and verify a practical potential of the concept.

In brief, the main user flow looks as follows: user inputs name of the business, selects industry, chooses a few pre-designed styles from templates, picks up colour schemes. These several steps were supposed to lead to the automated generation of a logo with a watermark.

A fundamental job that determined the success of the project was designing the model of logo generator's engine.

This came down to the following flow:

• at the beginning of the process, a batch of logos with random parameters was created,
• from this batch, those which broke some base design principle were filtered out i.e. those without sufficient contrast between colours,
• finally, a Machine Learning classifier, trained on examples hand-labeled as good or bad, filtered out those logos that didn’t reach a certain quality.

The model used as machine learning classifier was a neural network created in TensorFlow. This framework exposes to programmer low-level API that allows having better control over the architecture of the neural network.

There have been over one year of close cooperation between Levatis and Merixstudio’s Angular team. We kicked off the project by integrating with the client and team in their headquarters in Vienna where our developers travelled for a few day onboarding processes. In this early stage, Merixstudio’s team performed a code review to test for application performance and code quality. This was a prerequisite for assessing the general health of the application (including main pains/gains) indicating remedial points (including the suggested action points and recommendations). The next step was implementing new features such as a time tracking tool, CRUD views for projects, and human resources planner.

The division of work’s scope was quite clear-cut. Merixstudio took ownership of front-end development in Angular, whereas Levatis in-house team took care of back-end written in Java. The whole development was facilitated by agile methodologies.

Django CMS is a simple and developer-friendly system with a powerful and intuitive drag-and-drop interface. The application supports content management - it’s been built around the needs of marketers (offering multi-lingual publishing and built-in SEO tools) as well as developers (offering easy integration with other Django applications).

The client reached out to us with a need for quick scaling up their existing software development team in order to accelerate velocity and enrich the team with new skills. Initially, Merixstudio’s team kicked-off the project as a development extension of the Divio team, however, with time they have been given greater ownership and trust being recognised as core developers and consultants.

During the development, we remained in close contact with the external team not only remotely (via Slack, Jira, Skype videocons) but also on-site visiting Divio’s headquarters and Divio clients's branches in the crucial phases of the development.

Our approach was to create the MVP of the solution to get the product to early customers and let the client achieve business KPIs in a timely fashion. Functionalities and priorities were discussed with the client and multidisciplinary team during the two-day in-house Product Design Workshop. This helped us to forge product requirements and tailored solutions having been focused on users and business needs. Design Thinking was a strategic and practical process that made us achieve it.

Thanks to the outcome of the workshop, we were able to proceed smoothly with the wire-framing and graphic design phase during which we were in close cooperation with a development team so that we design tech-viable and effective solutions. Apart from the UX/UI visual assets, we crafted marketing materials that client used for talks with investors, encouraging operators to use the application and, consequently, unlocking the potential of the B2B-oriented part of the platform.

On the basis of a prior product design process, we crafted and launched a responsive web-based application on the Python Django framework. The whole development workflow was individual and adjustable to the current project’s needs. We were inspired by Agile development and followed selected Scrum ceremonies fine-tuning their frequencies to the changing environment and team size. 

The collaboration with Bronson Vitamins started more than 10 years ago and since then it has been a strong partnership based on a series of different projects intermingled by less intensive maintenance time. Initially, we provided support in customizing Magento solutions and adjusting the e-commerce platform to the unique users (e.g. elderly users who browse the web using smaller screens) and business needs. We created a new fully responsive version of the store with a goal of optimizing online sales channels as well as redesigning the layout. All these combined resulted in growing traffic from mobile devices.

One of the recent milestones we worked on was a UX audit which was a precondition for complete re-design of the layout and making the new site fully responsive (RWD). UX audit was to capture relevant information that would support the process of redesigning in a smart way i.e. adjusting to the users by noticing and understanding their behaviour patterns, annoyances and mistakes. During this process, we relied mostly on data gathered via Hotjar. Within 2 000 sessions, we gathered: 1 411 desktop, 214 tablet, 375 phone unique sessions. This served as a solid ground for identifying less-than-perfect places and needed UX tweaks and in the later stage, wireframing of the new service and creating final UI design.

Merixstudio supported Omnigame in turning their UI design into powerful and superb casino games played by thousands of gamers. Throughout nearly two-year-long cooperation, we developed four state-of-the-art slot games. 

The core game developed was Grand Prix - single-seater fast-paced auto racing wrapped up with sleek graphics and smart animations. The game incorporated both skill and excitement that gave players an experience that was very close to driving a race car on the World Championship. It consisted of three smaller ones that were supposed maximized players engagement and encouraged to heavy use of the game.
To enhance the animation effect, we used Spine - 2D skeletal animation software. Spine facilitated the efficiency and workflow both for creating powerful animation and for integrating it into games’ design. One of the key assets of this solution is the smaller size (standard animation requires an image for each frame, however, Spine-fuelled animations store only the small bone data - attaching images to bones, then animating the bones) and smoothness of the animations (Spine animations use interpolation so animation is always as smooth as the frame rate - they can be displayed in slow motion with no loss in quality). 
The whole software development was in very close collaboration with clients’ in-house team, especially their proxy Product Owner that used to set priorities and direction for the development. We kicked off the project with two frontend developers and a project manager and kept this set-up for most of the collaboration time. This was long-term cooperation covering both intensive full-time development and maintenance.

The Client reached out to us with a rough product idea and an outline of its key objectives. Prior to kicking-off the development we needed to get to the stage when we have a clear shape of the product and the solid action plan, therefore, we decided to begin with an online Product Discovery Workshop participated by the founders and multidisciplinary Merixstudio’s team.

In the workshop, we focused on verifying the basic assumptions of the product and making sure that we have a perfect understanding of its goals, business model, users, and value proposition. After identifying loopholes, generating new ideas and adjusting them to specific users and business needs, we had a proper ground for crafting the final solution. In the end, we had the service described in the form of story map capturing the product shape and logic, defined MVP’s scope and development roadmap. It seems easier said than done - in fact, the process was very intensive and required effective management due to the number of stakeholders involved as well as time difference and the potential feedback loop it could cause.

Next, we proceeded with working on the MVP version of the project starting with wireframing that was kept 4 sprints ahead of the proper development. As regards the management, we followed the Scrumban methodology accompanied by Scrum events such as Daily, Review, plus ad-hoc Plannings, Refinements, and Retrospectives. Throughout 1 year of development, the team headcount varied from 2 to 9 people in its peak time and the composition included product owner, UX and UI designers, QA, front-end and back-end engineers.

Humanitrack is a platform for uniting communities to collaborate with the world, to formulate a plan and to push progress. Humanitrack is a progress tracking tool and accelerator for an unlimited number of long-term humankind goals, for example, all of the UN's Global Goals such as radicating thirst and hunger, extending lifespan, increasing quality of life, greatly reducing the cost of green energy or stabilizing the climate.

Merixstudio was initially occupied with developing an MVP for a platform yet our role has later evolved into developing a polished early beta version. A priority for the client was tobuild a working MVP of the platform on a budget without sacrificing any of the necessary features. The MVP needed to be exceptional as the platform and community around would define the client’s company as well would serve as a foundation for testing the core user base. Merixstudio was also responsible for designing the UI (using Material-UI) as well as the DevOps operations.

The team headcount in the peak time was 8 - it consisted of a project manager, QA specialist,  three frontend developers, a Python developer, a DevOps engineer as well as a UI and a UX lead. We followed SCRUM-driven development.

One of the most significant milestones to achieve was designing the highly-engaging platform’s mechanics and finding ways to encourage users to return and keep them engaged on the website. To take advantages of our possibilities and work out the best possible solutions, we decided to run an open user-centred design thinking workshop as a part of the World Usability Day Poznań 2018.  We selected 14 UX-enthusiasts as well as invited Humanitract‘s founders to collaborate during an intensive day-long workshop session. See the full coverage.

Happy Scribe is a high-end dynamic SaaS platform for researchers, journalists, podcasters, and media production companies. It uses state-of-the-art machine-learning models to transcribe audio/video files uploaded by users automatically. Happy Scribe is used in a plethora of different industries, whether it be in education all the way through to the entertainment.

We were tasked with, among other features, the development of a simple and functional player for video or audio. Apart from simply playing the material, users can also control it by clicking on text to jump to the specific point in audio or video simultaneously. 
  
The next thing we were responsible for was making the transcribed text as clear for users as possible. That’s why we introduce speaker Identification, which allows users to set the identification to differentiate between speakers.

Another problem we needed to tackle was how to help users to easily navigate the text when playing the transcribed file. We achieved that by adding the function of highlighting the text (similar to karaoke), which is synchronized with the spoken word. In addition to that, we introduced comments, which also are based on highlighting particular parts of the text.

One of the most interesting features we implemented was also a confidence Heatmap, which defines the value in the audio/video file transcribed into text. 

Full portfolio: http://bit.ly/HappyScribeClutch

Everclassic is a leading Danish online marketplace for vintage, Scandinavian design including furniture, ceramics, art, and other design objects. It is a large-scale platform including both online auctions and a marketplace. One of the main challenges for Merixstudio was to successfully take over the project from a team from Ukraine making it smooth and downtime-free. The key milestone achieved by Merixstudio was developing an English version of the website to help our partner thrive on the international market. This was proceeded by completing the unfinished legacy tasks such as rewriting Zend to Phalcon as well as Magento integration and performance optimization. The team composition was flexible and adjustable to the current project’s needs. We kicked off with one back-end developer and PM, then, on peak time scale up to four team members adding a front-end developer and QA specialist. The Client and Merixstudio’s manager shared the responsibility for the project management distributing it between the product-vision and process-coordination parts. Stack: Magento 2, Phalcon, Laravel, HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript Full protfolio: http://bit.ly/EverclassicClutch

Competenz4u is a SaaS startup for students in Austria who want to improve their math skills.

The client took the initiative to create a modern e-learning web application that combines his incredible flair for sharing knowledge and powerful Python development capabilities.

We've built fully responsive user experience and gave children access to affordable maths training videos via a recurring monthly subscription fee.

FLAVR is Belgian startup for hobby & professional chefs who want to sell homemade meals.

In the first two months, we were able to ship the MVP of the application, while after four months we finished working on its final version. What is especially noteworthy, in this projects such functionalities as Filters Module, Notifications, Follow chef, Admin Panel and System of discount coupons are used.

Playism is an indie-focused PC game digital distribution platform from Osaka, Japan. 

The scope of work involved design & development of high-profile, database driven multilingual, responsive web shop application (marketplace for indie games). One of the key project challenges was data migration from the old system (user accounts and products). The platform is hosted on scalable Amazon deployment space - AWS Elastic Beanstalk, fully utilizing its scalability features. 

U project (U Multi-touch Whiteboard) is an interactive app built for Digitaria International, headquartered in Luxembourg, company specializing in satellite telecommunications and multimedia software platforms. 

The purpose of the app was to fill in the gaps of existing e-learning platforms. To make it happen, we created a software-hardware-networking platform that facilitates content distribution and teacher vs students interactions via Multi Touch Interactive Whiteboards supporting up to 10 touches simultaneously.