Merixstudio

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.

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.

Merixstudio provided front-end development support for two of MF’s internal teams; among others, the onboarding team with a key focus of unifying the users’ onboarding process. This referred e.g. minimising differences between the flows on web and mobile, doing groundworks for A/B testing on user flow. We also dealt with data analysis and data visualisation ( we used for these dygraphs and chart.js - JavaScript charting libraries).

We followed agile management using “Quarterfall” model i.e. planning in 3-month blocks where OKRs were derived from work prioritised for the quarter. The team incorporated Scrum that served as a framework for delivery and employed its ceremonies that facilitated the development.

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.

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.

The whole development process showcased a great advantage of React Native as a multi-platform, JavaScript-based technology, as well as Python/Django as a backend technology. With the development of the Django-fuelled backend running smoothly we were sure that this is the most optimal technology for the projects of such nature. Beyond that, the team worked with of Redux, Web Sockets, and Django REST framework to deliver the application that went live in the summer of 2018.

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

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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 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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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/

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

training videos via a recurring monthly subscription fee.

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hosted on scalable Amazon deployment space - AWS Elastic Beanstalk, fully utilizing its scalability features. 

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.