Merixstudio

At the end of 2020, the mobile app had been in operation for a couple of years. While it did make the lives of the theme parks’ visitors easier, the client was aware of the product’s untapped potential. Feeling it was high time to unleash it, Six Flags looked for a knowledgeable tech partner who would make a good culture fit for the driven enterprise. 

Merixstudio undertook to achieve this goal through software modernization, which to date encompasses code refactoring, app redesign, and test automation, to name a few.

Six Flags had a clear vision in mind: making their mobile app smarter and more dynamic now and enriching it with new functionalities in the future. Knowing that, we began with a discovery phase to dig deeper into the app. Then, we reassessed the roadmap and, bearing in mind both the client’s and their users’ needs, prioritized software modernization, e.g., refactoring the code, updating libraries, and improving UX.

As the client wanted the outsourced tech team to take ownership and be proactive yet work hand in hand with the American team, we proposed to work in a dedicated team model. As of now, Merixstudio’s squad of 11 IT experts includes mobile and backend developers, a DevOps engineer, UX designers, QAs, and a Project Manager, who follow Kanban methodology and cooperate with Six Flag’s Product Manager.

Apart from further modernization, our plans for the future encompass launching a variety of features, e.g., booking parking places, or integration with Amazon Cognito for user authentication. We also seek to improve the app’s visual consistency in the upcoming months and continue redesigning it with ADA compliance in mind. All to make the Six Flags mobile app respond to its users’ needs even better and provide them with an unforgettable experience at the amusement parks.

Boston Solar is a Massachusetts-based solar panel systems installer operating on the residential and commercial markets. Their mission is to help customers cut energy costs while making a positive environmental change with green energy. The company prides itself on high-quality products, craft, and customer service. Together with the extensive experience gained through installing over 5,000 solar panels in the last decade, this has made Boston Solar a top green energy supplier in Massachusetts, a leading state in renewable electricity generation technologies.

For a long time, Boston Solar used a sophisticated Excel-based solar modeling and proposal tool. As the business expanded, the current solution became slower and less functional, proving insufficient in the end. What Boston Solar needed to keep growing was scalable, administrable, customizable, stable, and secure software that would empower their sales representatives to help customers make the right investment decision. 

Bearing in mind this goal, we undertook to translate the existing Excel solution into a fast and accurate web application, which, in essence, serves calculating savings coming from solar panels and creating offers with the estimations.

We kicked off the project with a one-day scoping session engaging Merixstudio’s cross-functional product development team and the client’s representatives: the Director of Technology, the Product Owner, and the Director of Sales. Together, we took a deep dive into the product context, including features, value, stakeholders, applicable regulations, and success criteria. As a result, we:

• created user story maps for three types of users (admin, sales admin, and sales representative), 
• identified opportunities, key challenges, and risks,
• picked the best-fitting technologies and tools,
• planned next steps on the way to delivering a functional MVP.

Founded by brothers coming from the family of farmers, FarmDroid ApS is on a mission to make the world a better place with technology. The company’s product, FarmDroid, is the world’s first automatic seeding and weeding robot. It utilizes leading-edge solutions to free farmers from repetitive manual labor, reduce CO2 emissions, and minimize the use of agrichemicals in the fields.

PROBLEM TO SOLVE

When we met in autumn 2020, FarmDroids were used by farmers wishing to reduce the cost of sowing and weeding crops in an eco-friendly way. Putting customer satisfaction first, the company kept looking for ways to improve the robots’ usability and increase their value from the end-users’ perspective. That’s how the client came up with the idea of developing software that would enable remote management of the robots and improve communication between farmers, distributors, and FarmDroid’s support team.

With app development lying outside FarmDroid ApS’s core competencies, the client decided to partner up with Merixstudio. Over the last two years, we collaborated twice: first to create the MVP and then to improve the app according to user feedback and enrich it with new features.

SOLUTIONS

Knowing their users’ pain points and desires, FarmDroid ApS approached us with well-defined expectations regarding the MVP’s features. To make the most of the client’s insights, we conducted a scoping session, during which we:

• dug deeper into the farming industry,
• defined the product’s value propositions,
• tracked the user flow of different actors (farmers, distributors, FarmDroid staff) with story mapping,
• defined technical requirements for the software. 

ALL DETAILS OF THE PROJECT: https://www.merixstudio.com/work/farmdroid/ 

The client’s mission is to increase the safety of athletes in injury-prone situations. They approached us with an initial vision of the product characterized by visual attractiveness, data readability, and scalability. The customer supplied low-fidelity screens, the app’s backend, along with the ready AWS setup and APIs, so our task was to develop the frontend for the desktop application.

One of the challenges we assumed was transposing raw biomechanical readings from impact sensors into readable and user-friendly data visualization dashboards. Another one was to create a future-proof and scalable solution, ready for new add-ons. Additionally, the design needed to facilitate the ability to white label the software at a later date.

The discovery phase revealed the users’ needs and functional expectations. A deep dive into the client’s sports niche during online workshops with domain experts and stakeholders allowed us to identify and create the product as it was envisioned. The scope of work, executed by Merixstudio’s experts working in the dedicated team model, included:

• Developing a UI and UX design (transposing complex, raw biomechanical data into usable charts for specific target groups and leveraging the Material-UI design to facilitate design reuse)
• Creating the frontend of the application
• Using the Next.js out-of-the-box Server-Side Rendering functionality to optimize the time needed for application rendering
• Conducting tests in Jest.js together with React-based unit tests and manual tests
• Implementing 3-D models for data presentation
• Integrating object types on the frontend in compliance with the GraphQL Schema API

PROBLEM TO SOLVE

The client reached out to Merixstudio thanks to the referral from their Product Owner, who worked with us in the past. To effectively transpose the requirements into a usable product, we followed the Scrum methodology with nine sprints in total. The 6-person project team covered all the bases starting from the introductory kick-off meeting through the workshop sessions during which they learned about the logic of the application and the requirements to facilitate effective execution.

The core of the proposed solution involved the frontend based on TypeScript and Next.js, with highly visual graphs presenting the biomechanical engineering data aggregated in the platform extended by videos recorded from different perspectives. This combination ensured easy maintenance of clean code as well as integration of object types in compliance with the GraphQL Schema API. The Apollo GraphQL client implemented is a top fast delivery platform that enabled faster time to market. We also took advantage of the Jest.js testing framework, manual tests, and the React Testing Library for unit tests to limit the number of mistakes and facilitate faster change implementation.

To cater to the data presentation requirements, we used Three.js for 3-D model creation. The Material-UI library in React helped to achieve a neat visual presentation quickly. It also ensured that users could take full advantage of touchscreens in case a mobile version was created in the future. Thinking about the daily work of researchers, we integrated advanced data plotting techniques such as violin plots and 3-D heatmaps. Colors, in turn, served to accentuate the important data in the graphs, increasing their comprehensibility.

From the visual standpoint, it was also crucial to enable multiple views as per user needs (e.g., week, month, and year views, game views, and views with breaks). Not all users had equal access levels to the data, so we introduced a read-only functionality for secondary users. Additionally, data export options to different formats facilitated knowledge sharing and information presentation. Users may narrow the data scope via filtering components.

From the visual standpoint, it was also crucial to enable multiple views as per user needs (e.g., week, month, and year views, game views, and views with breaks). Not all users had equal access levels to the data, so we introduced a read-only functionality for secondary users. Additionally, data export options to different formats facilitated knowledge sharing and information presentation. Users may narrow the data scope via filtering components.

ALL DETAILS OF THE PROJECT: https://www.merixstudio.com/work/biocore-mouthguard-sensors-mgs/

The Gwich’in Tribal Council (GTC) is an Indigenous organization that represents Gwich’in Participants in the Mackenzie-Delta of the Northwest Territories and across Canada. Over the years, most of the Gwich’in population has shifted to English, which caused their heritage language to become severely endangered. Therefore, one of the GTC’s main objectives is language revitalization. 
 

PROBLEM TO SOLVE

With language revitalization specialists on board but no experience in software development, the Council was looking for a tech partner who’d bring their idea to life. The client sought mobile development experience and support in defining the product vision further and setting measurable goals. To empower them with both, we put together a product team composed of developers, designers, a QA specialist, a DevOps engineer, and a Project Manager.

To build the first version of Kaiik'ìt, Merixstudio took care of:

• Holding a product design workshop to define with the client the product vision and value proposition
   
• Running a thorough competitors’ analysis to identify industry trends and space for innovation
   
• Conducting user tests to best address the needs of the target audience
   
• Designing the application flow and UI to incorporate the cultural aspects of the Gwich’in heritage
   
• Building the mobile application that works both online and offline

SOLUTIONS:

The first stage of our work on Kaiik'ìt meant filling in the gaps in the product vision. Giving the client a platform to voice expectations and simultaneously conducting market research allowed us to identify the tasks that would best facilitate learning an endangered complex language like Gwich’in. The Product Design team tested these assumptions with representatives of the app’s target audience. 

User tests began with the participants receiving extensive instructions explaining the installation process and the course of the research. Then, users would download the app and take part in the tests via video call. Introductory conversations about their culture, language knowledge, and experience with learning foreign languages led to users performing tasks within the app, e.g., creating an account, checking the word’s meaning in a dictionary, or finishing a lesson. Thanks to a combination of screen sharing and video calls, Merixstudio’s designers could see how users interact with the app and observe their facial expressions. As a result of the tests, we examined the app’s usability and decided to go for thematic modules with interactive exercises focused on vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation. 

The application is more than a language-learning tool, though. It’s also a means of exploring the Gwich’in culture – which is why our designers used visual storytelling to incorporate elements of the indigenous heritage within the software. The app's name was initially Gwich’in. However, as the work progressed, it changed to a more unique Kaiik'ìt (which translates to community) and now points to the importance of building language-centric communities, where Elders and Youth work together towards language and culture preservation. The logo is also a means of telling the product’s story. Shaped as a chat bubble and made of tribal beads, it is essentially a visual representation of learning Gwich’in. 

We aimed to build a high-performant, good-looking, and scalable solution in a relatively short time. Achieving these goals on the mobile side was made possible by Flutter. On the backend, on the other hand, it was django-polymorphic that allowed us to optimize the database queries and ensure that adding new types of exercises in the future will be a breeze. As we enjoyed a lot of freedom in choosing the best tech solutions, we could also adopt a forward-looking attitude to the architecture and draft the roadmap based on our experience. A result of this approach was a smooth introduction of the offline mode, which wasn’t a must-have initially but turned out to be invaluable due to many Gwich’in speakers living in low-connectivity areas. 

Once the Kaiik'ìt user downloads a module, they can interact with the app and complete tasks just as they would if they had access to the Internet. The entire offline logic of validating users’ answers and scoring them is handled by the mobile app, and the backend is notified of the change in data immediately after the user goes online. In addition to downloading content, the app caches images and audio even in the online mode. That way, when the user decides to download a given lesson, the download is quicker – and so is going through a lesson online because it doesn’t initiate a download from scratch every time. 

ALL DETAILS OF THE PROJECT: https://www.merixstudio.com/work/kaiikit/

Rosalyn is an AI-powered remote assessment, proctoring, and certification platform. The company’s founders envisioned the solution with two types of users in mind: the examining bodies (including schools, universities, and commercial certifying organizations) and the examinees. Rosalyn allows the former to keep the assessment of remote tests accurate, cheating-free, and cost-effective. The latter benefit by getting the opportunity to have their hard work rewarded with a recognized certification regardless of where they’re located.

PROBLEM TO SOLVE

When we first met, Rosalyn was an edtech startup with proven AI and computer vision capabilities and a mission to keep assessment unbiased. They needed a tech partner who’s skilled in product design and development and knows how to tackle the pain points of early-stage ventures. Having examined our portfolio, skills, and testimonials, Rosalyn entrusted Merixstudio with the following tasks:

1. Conducting the discovery workshop to draft the development roadmap,
2. Providing UI designs and branding to the product,
3. Developing components of a complex platform for creating, taking, and assessing examinations,
4. Building a complex remote proctoring tool around the company’s AI solution,
5. Suggesting optimal solutions based on our experience and expertise.

We’ve been working on the MVP since December 2019. The usefulness of Rosalyn’s concept has already been recognized, as our client raised seed round funding totaling $2.2MM from private investors in November 2020.

SOLUTIONS

Our partnership started with a two-day workshop, during which Merixstudio’s team of 3 developers, a UX designer, and a PM talked to the client’s representatives – CEO, CTO, and the Product Manager – to uncover their needs and expectations. Sorting out priorities allowed us to proceed with wireframes and designs, which laid the foundations for the smooth development.

Next, we put together a cross-functional team whose task was to build a complex yet scalable system. Cooperating with the client’s AI team, our developers have created an online live proctoring app and come up with multiple fraud prevention strategies within the desktop app, such as prohibiting screenshots, using external apps throughout the exam, and forcing users to unplug the external monitor before starting the exam.

The desktop application makes an essential part of Rosalyn’s platform, as it supports different operating systems and facilitates live streaming. It also sustains the exam session even in case of temporary connection breakdown, which comes in handy considering different locations of the examinees. The app is Electron-based, which translates into a wider developer talent pool accessible for development and future maintenance.

Ever since the onset of the project, security has been one of the main concerns. On the one hand, the client established strict access permission rules and continues to educate our team on cybersecurity threats and best practices. On the other hand, Merixstudio’s QA specialists followed rigid rules concerning user data protection. 

Among the most prominent project challenges, there’ve been load tests, which – due to their complexity – required the creation of a dedicated tool. Another challenge was integration with Vonage Video API (formerly known as TokBox), which enables video sharing between the user, AI-powered app, and proctoring panel. Last but not least, as is often the case in the startup world, now and then, project requirements change – Merixstudio’s team manages these changes thanks to Agile development.

Now, we’re focusing on delivering an open API and utilizing the LMS LTI standard to enable the integration of Rosalyn’s tool with external learning management platforms such as Canvas, Moodle, or Brightspace. This calls for two things: making the platform fully LTI compliant in terms of user interaction with Rosalyn’s system on the one hand, and ensuring that online proctoring within the app takes place regardless of the test engine on the other hand.

To achieve the best results possible, we stay flexible in terms of the adopted workflow. Merixstudio’s development team works hand in hand with Rosalyn’s AI team supervised by the client’s tech leads. Simultaneously, we don’t refrain from suggesting improvements related to the adopted tech solutions and time and effort management. We also proactively consult with Rosalyn’s Product Managers about requirements for features yet to come. As far as our daily job is concerned, we follow Scrum, organize our work into two-week sprints, and use tools like Jira or Slack to ensure full transparency.

ALL DETAILS OF THE PROJECT: https://www.merixstudio.com/work/rosalyn/ 

Treasure Earth is a mobile app for individuals, communities, and sustainability-oriented organizations to promote environmental problems-centered activities. Its main goal lies in encouraging acts of compassion by users to ensure their greater agency in green issues and the conservation of the Earth. With this goal in mind, the app is supposed to gather like-minded people from around the world to execute environmental change together.

PROBLEM TO SLOVE

The premise behind creating the app was the challenge that eco-friendly communities face today: people’s lack of agency in furthering environmental causes. Those who are sensitive to the damage done to the environment are bombarded with negative news about the effects of climate change, and even though they are acutely aware of the need to act, they find themselves effectively limited by the influx of information and too many issues worth tackling.

Therefore, the application’s goal was to provide a digital platform with which users could turn their compassion for the state of our planet into action. They would do that by engaging in introspection and eco-friendly activity. The client envisioned the product with two types of users in mind - individuals and organizations. 

The company approached Merixstudio being already familiar with the referrals from our previous digital projects. The client’s stakeholders decided to engage in workshops with us to dig deeper into the specifics of the future product.

PROCESS & SOLUTION

As time was of the essence, the client chose Merixstudio’s dedicated cooperation model, where an outsourced team fully supports a timely development with full project ownership.

Our team, consisting of 9 people, kicked off the work with online workshops. They allowed for learning about the client’s niche and goals and the concept for the mobile app. This way, we learned about the business context necessary for bringing the client’s vision into reality. 

We followed the Scrum methodology to make the best out of the time at our disposal. The mutual collaboration across different time zones allowed the project team to squeeze the most out of the online meetings, including the scoping and product-related decisions. In the process, we covered all the bases starting from the MVP stage and the further execution phase to maintenance.

The scope of the works included:

• Performing workshops to establish the requirements and scope of works
• Developing a new mobile app for Android and iOS and a web-based admin panel for the client for managing users and their communities
• Designing the UI and UX of the application (including high-fidelity wireframes)
• Performing development works on the frontend, backend and creating an infrastructural setup for the mobile app
• Incorporating the necessary functionalities that would foster community building
• Performing the Quality Assurance works
• Conducing DevOps works
• App maintenance 

With the motto for the app being “Intend, Decide, Practice, Act, Track”, we designed the solution in such a way as to allow users to engage in eco-friendly activities. By means of the main functionalities (communities and campaigns) both individuals and organizations can partake in collective action, furthering environmental initiatives.

To maintain pixel-perfect designs, we decided to use the styled-components library which gets the job done great when coupled with React — that approach is called “styles in Javascript”.

React had a crucial impact on this project. Because of that technology, we could keep the code consistency between the admin panel and mobile app for Android and iOS. React also guarantees a stable code and facilitates the creation of many reusable components. Not to mention that easy React-based template designing allowed us to save time for other works in this project.

We decided to use Redux toolkit to keep the app data clean and readable. It proves especially useful when working in a team because it provides predefined rules on dealing with APIs, storing data, and displaying results in views.

The client already had an AWS infrastructure, so we utilized that and added some scaling-friendly solutions. The team orchestrated containers across the cloud setup to provide independent services. The added value of using Elastic Container Service (ECS) is low maintenance. We deployed the app through the GitLab tool, facilitating smooth team collaboration and effective commits management. We used PostgreSQL as a backend database, along with Django, for additional scalability.

ALL DETAILS OF THE PROJECT: https://www.merixstudio.com/work/treasure-earth/ 

Facta is a cloud-based platform for accounting professionals. It offers QuickBooks users smooth onboarding thanks to the user-friendly UI, eliminates tedious spreadsheet work, and allows making the most of the financial data. Facta’s mission is to increase the efficiency of bookkeeping companies and empower accountants to deliver more value in a shorter time.

PROBLEM TO SOLVE

When we crossed paths, the platform was on the market since February 2021 and has allowed Facta to build a solid client base. The company’s goal was twofold: to cater to its current users’ needs and to scale up by increasing the customer base. Thus, Facta’s priority was to find a tech partner who’d help them both take care of the product’s maintenance and introduce new cutting-edge features.

Our scope of work included:

• UI audit and subsequent improvement of user experience
• Code quality audit and refactoring
• Ongoing software maintenance
• Introducing new product features

PROCESS & SOLUTION

As Facta wanted to assemble a team of experienced and knowledgeable software development experts who’d join forces with their in-house professionals, we decided to work in a team augmentation model. Merixstudio’s project team included UX and UI designers, developers, and a Scrum Master. Since understanding the client’s domain and keeping up to date with their expectations was a priority for us, we held regular meetings with Facta’s team and followed best practices of Scrum.

To improve the usability of the platform, we kicked off the design work with a UI audit. This allowed us to identify the legacy element of the design and come up with the solutions to make the interface more coherent. For example, we created an all-encompassing style guide and ensured consistency of component design across interfaces of Facta’s features. As we engaged with the client’s team to dig deeper into the domain and its design implications, we began to build the prototype of the Fixed Assets module in Figma. The detailed high-fidelity prototype with multiple views helped the client visualize the revamped interface, facilitated developer handoff, and served gathering user feedback.

On the backend side, our task was to improve code quality and ensure the solutions employed meet current business goals. Facta decided to stick to its guns (Golang, AWS, PostgreSQL) but also to polish them up. Working hand in hand with the client’s Head of Engineering, we rewrote the server-side code, paying special attention to its clarity and maintainability. 

The frontend work began with the examination of the code’s current state and the identification of areas for improvement. To spot rendering-related issues, we used React.Profiler, whereas DevTools helped us diagnose errors in console and recurring calls to backend. Although not yet dangerous, these vulnerabilities could harm user experience and hamper the client’s growth in the long run. 

Bearing in mind the fact that the platform was already in use, our devs undertook to refactor the code while keeping the app fully available to the users. Using Linter and TypeScript, we increased the code’s cohesion, which translated into fewer bugs and improved UX. To better manage the app’s state, which is crucial in the case of a financial platform handling comprehensive data, we implemented Redux with Redux Toolkit. Last but not least, we eliminated unnecessary repetitions, created reusable components, and improved efficiency of rendering data-loaded tables with styled-components. Simultaneously, we built a new codebase for the Fixed Assets module in such a way to allow the client to implement it in the remaining features in the future.

The joint maintenance efforts and new feature development allowed Facta to grow steadily. With user experience improving and fewer bugs appearing. The platform kept receiving positive reviews from its current customers and joined the ranks of applications recommended by QuickBooks Online. Enriching the platform with new features, on the other hand, attracted the attention of new clients, including big names in the bookkeeping industry.

ALL DETAILS OF THE PROJECT: https://www.merixstudio.com/work/facta/

Norma Precision’s mission is to allow marksmen to become even better at their outdoor craft. The client approached us with a specified vision for a premium web and mobile application characterized by usability, reliability, and intuitiveness. The end product users’ awaited a brand new mobile and desktop app that would replace a previous mature solution no longer accommodating the client’s current needs. The discovery phase revealed the users’ needs and functional expectations.

PROBLEM TO SOLVE

The scope of work, executed by Merixstudio’s dedicated product team with full project ownership, included:

• Developing a new UI and UX design
• Implementing mathematical calculations in Dart based on the C language solutions delivered
• Leveraging JavaScript interoperability to launch the calculations on a desktop app
• Performing indispensable automatic tests to validate the accuracy of the algorithmic setup
• Executing relevant calculations to obtain the metric system result
• Developing a usable mobile and web app based on a mathematical engine for calculations
• Functional enhancements 
• App maintenance

PROCESS & SOLUTION

To effectively transpose the requirements into a usable product, we followed an Agile methodology with 2-week sprints. The 10-people project team covered all the bases starting from the MVP stage and further execution phase to maintenance, with an open prospect for continued collaboration.

The core of the proposed solution involved using Flutter, a modern high-performing cross-platform toolkit coming with Google’s stable support, a reusable code base, and fast time-to-market perspectives. This choice included a critical analysis of the toolkit’s capability for seamless external Bluetooth communications and the possibility of complex chart rendering. It allowed the project to fit high usability, incl. custom widgets, into a tight deadline that was of specific importance for the client and their users. 

Flutter served as a technological basis for the functionally indispensable mathematical engine and precise calculator in the mobile version. It also enabled a flexible UI design, library accessibility, and cross-platform usability for Android and iOS. Flutter was complemented by other mobile setup elements. Firebase boosted development by enabling easy app development and releases, while Bitrise.io facilitated automated code management. Localizely provided added value for the mobile app’s supplementary multi-language user interface.

Our software experts also ensured that the final product reflected the client’s requirements. A deep dive into specific Domain Knowledge of the client’s outdoor activity niche allowed us to craft a highly usable and precise app based on complex mathematical algorithms created from scratch. These algorithms enabled users to have the projectile trajectory thoroughly calculated so that they could focus on perfecting their craft. To that end, we employed unit and manual testing which bulletproofed the application to work in a local environment.

For the desktop version, the Merixstudio team used ReactJS that, together with Redux and Webpack, provided a usable setup for the Iframe-based web app. The Flutter team also converted the Dart-based code into a desktop-capable version that powered the frontend of the web app. We also implemented REST API, HTML5, and CSS, while our Flutter experts’ calculations' code conversion supported the revamped version of the existing web app. 

The project team’s flexible approach during Sprint 0 enabled a fast adoption of the most apt backend solutions. Merixstudio executed an AWS Lambda platform enablement to cater to the client’s serverless needs.Thanks to this solution, the integration with AirTable was possible because the product data derived from AWS was easily accessible to the mobile or desktop app.
 

Our custom-made mathematical engine processes calculations to display both metric and imperial units measurements. The tricky part about this process is to avoid conversion-related inaccuracies which, in this precision business, constitute the very risk of mounting estimation discrepancies.  As a result of our software experts’ customized approach to this challenge, the app beats the relevant competition in a field-test “accuracy contest” related to the imperial-to-metric-units conversion.

ALL DETAILS OF THE PROJECT: https://www.merixstudio.com/work/norma-precision/

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. 
 

PROBLEM TO SOLVE
 

Genuine Impact founders were on a lookout for an experienced product design and development 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

PROCESS & SOLUTION

Alister & Truman, two London-based founders searched for product design and UX agency, able to deliver mobile, desktop, and marketing assets shortly before releasing their MVP.

Merixstudio approached them underlining product design capabilities combined with experience gained through a proven track record. After gathering the requirements we started delivering mobile and UI designs, working collaboratively with the client.

Both Poznań and London-based teams maintained permanent communication using Slack and arranging videoconferences every 2-3 days. Due to tight deadlines, strictly determined by the business circumstances, the Merixstudio product design team delivered >20 unique views, logo, and entire branding assets.

Genuine Impact Founders were granted access to the Invision files, maintaining real-time communication. Constant feedback & best practices gave on-time delivery, followed by the 2nd, development phase.

After the successful delivery of designs, our frontend team undertook to deliver Vue.js components for the RWD web app, slightly implemented by the Genuine Impact in-house engineering team.

ALL DETAILS OF THE PROJECT: https://www.merixstudio.com/work/genuine-impact/

Moneyfarm is one of the largest online investment and digital wealth management companies in Europe. They provide solutions and support to protect and increase your wealth through time which boils down to three key services, namely General investments, Stocks & Shares ISA, Pension. The company announced in May of 2018 that it raised £40 million in Series B funding - the largest funding round by a European digital wealth manager to date - from Allianz Asset Management.
 

PROBLEM TO SOLVE

The Client reached out to Merixstudio with a need for experienced React developers that could serve as a supportive team extension in order to increase the velocity of their internal team and enrich the skillset. The key challenge for Merixstudio was to smoothly and quickly align themselves with the existing team and codebase in order to quickly contribute to the key milestones, namely unifying the onboarding process and redesigning the existing dashboard.

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.

PROCESS & SOLUTION

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.

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. minimizing 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 visualization (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 prioritized for the quarter. The team incorporated Scrum that served as a framework for delivery and employed its ceremonies that facilitated the development.

ALL DETAILS OF THE PROJECT: https://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.
 

PROBLEM TO SOLVE

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.

PROCESS & SOLUTION

Our approach was to create the MVP of the solution to get the product to pilot customers and let the client raise more funding to enhance the functionality of the solution further.

Functionalities and priorities were discussed with the client and multidisciplinary team during the two-day in-house Product Design Workshops. This helped us confirm product requirements and compose a cross-functional team adjusted to project needs, consisting of Agile Project Manager, two Product Designers, two Backend Engineers, Frontend and Mobile Engineers, and Quality Assurance Specialist.

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.

Some of the first visuals were also used in talks with investors, which enabled the client to secure funding for the MVP.

On the basis of a prior product design process, we crafted and launched a React Native based iOS and Android mobile application + web-based application on the Python Django framework.

These are powerful software solutions for fleet operators, providing digitally automated systems for the management of vehicle compliance, drivers and incidents. They help businesses move away from spreadsheets and multiple systems, to work on a web-based platform and provide drivers with access to a mobile app for remote, life reporting.

To deliver the best results, we were inspired by Agile development and followed selected Scrum ceremonies fine-tuning their frequencies to the changing environment, team size and client’s needs. To guarantee full transparency of our processes, we communicated regularly using selected channels such as e-mail, Slack, and Hangouts, and other modern software solutions. The whole development workflow was individual and adjustable to the current project’s needs. 

ALL DETAILS OF THE PROJECT: https://www.merixstudio.com/work/autium/

SportsHi is a high school sports network, empowering US-based students to be active and engaged with both sports and their communities. 
 

PROBLEM TO SOLVE

Our client, an after-hour rugby coach, noticed the need for high schools students to manage their training and games in a variety of school and amateur leagues. Many of them must travel long distances to show up for the training. Hence he decided to tackle a problem of ineffective organization and management of training and matches and searched for the best software development company to take the challenge and build a multi-platform React mobile application from scratch in a timely manner. 

PROCESS & SOLUTION

SportsHi is an outcome of the collaboration between two teams living and working on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. The app founders were seated in their New York-based headquarters, while the development team was in Merixstudio’s office in Poznań, Poland.

The work started with a pre-kick-off in-depth consultative analysis of the project (including the design delivered by a client) - thanks to that after a few sessions we were sure that we fully understand both the client’s needs and project’s objectives as well as we have a relevant skill set to address them.

The whole development was split into two phases; firstly, the 12-week MVP that make the application available to the first group of users; secondly, 8-week V2 of the projects that made us implement the remaining functionalities and adjustments. It was a Scrum-driven development with 2-week sprints that served as a framework for incremental delivery of the new features.

When it comes to the main functionalities of this React Native app, it has two main components - Connect and Create. The first one allows users to connect with people they share a team/group with - users can send instant messages and have group conversations with other users. The second component, on the other hand, enables sharing information with a network and create a group or event. What’s more - it distinguishes three types of users: players and coaches. Both have the ability to create three types of groups (team, school, and community) and three types of events (match, practice, and social). 

The product 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. The application successfully went live in the summer of 2018.

ALL DETAILS OF THE PROJECT: https://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.

PROBLEM TO SOLVE

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.

PROCESS & SOLUTION

One of the key elements of the beginning of the cooperation with Burrow was to focus on refactoring of the frontend from a legacy state management system to a cutting edge state management solution. 

To achieve this, we started from a very quick onboarding of 1x full-time react developer and part-time project manager from our side. Within the next few weeks, that team scaled up and we started updating infrastructure to support the new state management framework. As this was a very open-ended task, along with the Product Manager on Burrow side we prepared a detailed plan so we could monitor the progress of the work and to make sure that we are always on the right track.

We followed Agile management using Scrumban that served as a framework for delivery and includes ceremonies like dailies, retrospectives, or sprint planning that facilitated the development. Thanks to the smooth implementation of the best project management practices, we were able to deliver the best results.

This refactoring radically increased the performance and the ease of maintenance of the codebase. As expected this was a very fluid task, which was executed along with expectations set in the development timeline set by the client. 

It has been over 9-months of close cooperation between Burrow and Merixstudio’s team. During this period we have had a contribution to the biggest update of the application consisting of product listing & details pages design updates, releasing a new product, new modifiers options and many more.

ALL DETAILS OF THE PROJECT: https://www.merixstudio.com/work/burrow

Szkoła Małego Inżyniera is a website supporting Volkswagen in spreading their values and building their brand awareness among the youngest. This is a non-profit educational project targeted at primary school children - its key objective is awakening students’ passion for robotics and automated technology as well as a creative and proactive approach.

PROBLEM TO SOLVE:

The key challenges were:

• creating a robust and fraud-resistant voting system for schools so that it cannot be exploited by bots,
• making the solution capable of handling heavy traffic loads.

PROCESS & SOLUTION

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) programs 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.

ALL DETAILS OF THE PROJECT: https://www.merixstudio.com/work/volkswagen/

Juilliard School music students needed to perform a number of public recitals. Scheduling and planning for these recitals was an iterative process that involved a significant amount of back and forth between the student recitalist and the Juilliard Concert Office. This created a need for developing an advanced Recital Management System (RMS) which streamlines a complex process of students’ registration for performances.

PROBLEM TO SOLVE:

The key challenges were:

• designing a complex system that handles high traffic as well as advanced notifications and booking workflows,
• working effectively with a 6-hour time zone difference between teams.

PROCESS & SOLUTION

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, the 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 a 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 the 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, a tool to create dynamic forms and other mechanisms meant to simplify the whole process of preparing a recital.

ALL DETAILS OF THE PROJECT: https://www.merixstudio.com/work/juilliard-rms/

BrandSync is a custom-designed product information management (PIM) platform for brands and retailers to share content and digital assets on an enterprise-scale via one central hub. The product was built for a globally recognised brand GS1 - a worldwide non-profit organization, responsible for, among others, the standardisation of barcodes. BrandSync itself supports worldwide brands e.g. Mars, Procter&Gamble, Carrefour, Estee Lauder.

PROBLEM TO SOLVE

The client was on the lookout of the team with a great competence for designing a complex, human-centered digital product and developing a technically strong solution that is efficient, smart, and collaborative.

The product addresses the challenges of managing extensive product information and the demands of sharing this information with multiple recipients. The specifics of such a product came with some key issues to solve:

• turning the vague project idea into the ready-to-implement scope of work,
• designing the complex product that will meet users' and business goals,
• also, three more specific ones concerning the data distribution i.e.:
• gathering and processing of a large amount of product information, 
• data standardisation and unification for all of supply chain participants, 
• further data circulation within the internal and external scopes.

PROCESS & SOLUTION

The BrandSync application was built from scratch. The very first task was to plan out how to turn a 3-page brief of the project into a working solution in the best possible way. We began with an extensive scoping session with the client during which the team had an opportunity to understand both the needs of the users and the particular roles in a complex data exchanging processes, gather and clear out the requirements and understand the businesshuman-centered our partner. This let us have firm ground for further steps.

For the first 6 months, BrandSync app was developed following the Scrum methodology. With a growing team, established workflow, and well-maintained communication, the team moved smoothly to Scrumban. Each three month period has its three major milestones and one goal to be achieved by software developers. Both aims and milestones were discussed and accepted by the business partner. 

One of the major challenges was to combine simplicity with flexibility and create as user-friendly tools as possible. The team decided to create custom-made designs that freed us from the limitations imposed by ready-made UI sets and frameworks. As regards the tech stack, we have decided to use Angular as one of the best solutions for creating such complex web applications as well as Python and Django framework. We’ve also chosen PostgreSQL for the database as one of the best Open Source database management systems that can handle high volumes of data and for its reliability and stability.  

Thanks to the deep understanding of the business goals, Merixstudio’s development team managed to combine a complex data structure with a user-friendly interface. The whole development process demonstrated the strengths of agile methodologies and highlighted the role of empathy during the product discovery phase. The combination of business acumen, designing skills, and most modern engineering delivered a solution for entrepreneurs representing a variety of branches.

ALL DETAILS OF THE PROJECT: https://www.merixstudio.com/work/brandsync

SafeEx provides a digital management tool comprising a web and mobile app for planned inspection and maintenance routines across a wide range of verticals, from oil and gas, through manufacturing, to renewable energy, and beyond. On the one hand, the software promotes a predictive approach to maintenance. On the other, it fosters the digitalization of traditional manual processes. It does so, among others, by providing Ex Inspectors with dynamic checklists to quickly measure parameters and performance of various large-scale hardware and machinery. As a result, SafeEx’s mobile application improves efficiency, quality, and safety in day-to-day operations.

PROBLEM TO SOLVE

When SafeEx approached us, the company was immensely successful in expanding its customer pool. Their top priority was to ensure that their tool keeps up with the company's business growth. The client’s system has been in operation for over a decade, during which time both technology and SafeEx’s objectives have evolved. While the current customers could enjoy all benefits of the digital management tool, the company decided to adopt a more far-sighted approach and put an even greater emphasis on future growth.

Once we got in touch with the client’s representatives, we focused on understanding SafeEx’s business needs and clarifying their expectations, which boiled down to taking the user experience to the next level and adopting a long-term perspective on the product’s growth. Our software development experts involved at that stage of the discovery process managed to dispel the client’s tech doubts and give straight answers to problematic questions. This, in turn, laid solid foundations for our further collaboration.

So far, the scope of work included:

• Refactor of major components

• Optimization of legacy code

• Migration from MySQL to PostgreSQL

• Designing strategy of migration to AWS

• Switch from Python 2 to 3, async processing of already existing processes

• Mobile App Push Synchronization API revamp with extensive usage of Redis cache to ensure stable processing and recovery in the event of connection failure

PROCESS & SOLUTION 

Our cooperation started with a product design workshop. At this pre-development stage, our team of both backend and mobile developers, product designers, a QA specialist, and a PM joined efforts with the client’s representatives, including SafeEx’s CTO, Development Manager, and Product Developer. Together, we aimed to analyze the current solution structure, define the core functionalities and the value proposition of the product, as well as identify the future users’ needs. During the workshop, Merixstudio’s squad was proactive in suggesting improvements to the existing tool and discussing the software’s impact on the client’s business strategy for the future. In the end, we agreed to focus on performance enhancements and following the path of gradual modernization.

What’s unique about SafeEx’s tool is that its mobile component is meant to work in a highly challenging environment where the internet connection is poor, e.g., on oil rigs. To ensure that no data synchronization issues bother the tool’s users, we chose to cache the data with Redis. This way, Ex Inspectors can be sure there will be no lost connections and server errors, regardless of whether they chose to synchronize at sea or on land.

Our goal was also to enhance the user experience of SafeEx’s tool. We did that, among others, by speeding up the loading times, as well as minimizing the amount of data to be sent – thus shortening the time needed for exporting and importing them. Driven by the desire to bulletproof the system further and provide seamless UX to current and future customers, we’ve also engaged in refactoring the codebase.

During the development process, we adopted the team augmentation model. Ours and SafeEx’s engineers worked hand in hand; at the same time, Merixstudio’s developers didn’t refrain from suggesting alternative solutions once they spotted room for improvement. One example of our team’s proactivity was designing the change of infrastructure from on-premise servers to cloud and drafting the comprehensive plan of migration to AWS. Another one was implementing a microservice-based solution to increase the app’s stability. 

When discussing collaboration with SafeEx, it’s also worth mentioning the overall flexibility. As the project progresses, the client’s priorities change – and so does the team composition on our part. Since the onset in May 2020, our team’s been powered by backend developers and DevOps engineers, the number of which fluctuates according to the current needs.

ALL DETAILS OF THE PROJECT: https://www.merixstudio.com/work/safeex/

Ginny is a custom parking management mobile application designed and developed for Merixstudio’s internal purposes. Its main goal is to streamline the process of booking a limited number of parking spaces.

The mobile app has been created as a response to the challenge of improving communication between multiple users – over 100 employees who want to book one of the 30 available parking spaces for a defined period of time. 

PROBLEM TO SOLVE

The specification of the application has been created with the needs of its prospective users in mind:

• developing parking space management system indicating total parking availability in real-time,
• gathering and processing information from several separate sources,
• developing a technically strong solution that is efficient, smart, and collaborative,
• designing from scratch as intuitive mobile app as possible. 

Since the solution allowing for the optimization of the reservation management is an MVP, we also had to face the challenge of assuring further scalability of the product.

PROCESS & SOLUTION

The concept of Ginny mobile application was based on an in-depth analysis of our current process. Initially, we had managed 20 parking spaces, each permanently assigned to a given employee. Due to the company’s growth, more and more inquiries about available parking spaces started to appear on various channels, including Slack, Facebook, and direct questions to the HR department.

The in-depth analysis of the reservation process showed us three major issues to tackle. Firstly, many parking spaces were not used efficiently (e.g. they remained empty when their holders weren’t at work). Secondly, only one person in the HR department knew the exact availability of parking spaces. Last but not least, following the company’s expansion, the number of parking spaces increased from 20 to 30. As a result, we had to find the most reasonable and fair way to make the new spots available to all employees. 

Being aware of the areas that require optimization, we put together an interdisciplinary team of frontend and backend developers, experienced product designers, and an agile project manager. With an established workflow and well-maintained communication (regular meetings), we clearly defined the goal to be achieved. That’s how we started working on a technically outstanding parking management application.

We decided that 20 parking spaces would remain permanently assigned to a couple of employees and the additional ten should function as spots whose ownership is subject to change. By logging to the Ginny app, employees can easily trace available parking spaces, view available spots, and book them with a simple tap on the screen. 

Our product designers had hands full of work with building the mobile application from scratch. Though the visual side was mostly based on Merixstudio’s corporate identity, we wanted to adjust is to the freshest trends in mobile application design. Thus, we went for minimalism and used intense contrasting colors along with smooth layout animations. 

As far as the tech stack is concerned, we have decided to use Flutter as one of the best cross-platform solutions for modern, top-notch mobile applications. We’ve also chosen the highly-performance Go, Python, and Flask framework to build a functional MVP fast and facilitate quick iteration after every feedback cycle.

ALL DETAILS OF THE PROJECT: https://www.merixstudio.com/work/ginny

The product we developed for Leo Trippi, an award-winning travel agency specializing in luxury ski holidays and tailor-made escapes, is based on three pillars. To begin with, Python-based BackOffice Server stores data about Leo Trippi’s luxury holidays offer and provides a user-friendly interface for managing the content on the client’s website. Then, Pricing and Availability Calendar and Sales Dashboard applications facilitate access to data and management of the offer on the part of the client’s employees. Finally, the redesigned Leo Trippi website makes it easy for the end-users to quickly find and book a property that matches their expectations – regardless of whether they’re browsing on web or mobile.

PROBLEM TO SOLVE

When we first met Leo Trippi, they wished to have a new interface for one of their applications created and implemented. Sounds like a basic task, doesn’t it? However, as we talked more about the clients’ expectations and the current situation, we discovered that they might need a more comprehensive service than we initially suspected.

During the discovery calls and three scoping sessions, we learned that the technology fuelling Leo Trippi couldn’t keep up with the company’s business growth. On the one hand, being made of codependent WordPress-based applications, the system struggled with scalability and efficiency of the current backend tech stack. On the other hand, the complex architecture harmed UX by limiting flexibility and hindering the work of the system’s users. 

With solutions that would suit a startup but not a scaleup in place, the systematic development and maintenance of the system over time would be an enormous challenge. And since the backend always influences the frontend of the system, we knew that revamping the interface wouldn’t do in this case. With the real issues being the bulky code and scattered functionalities, what the client needed was, first and foremost, a more cohesive system architecture. Such an approach was undeniably more expensive than the implementation of the new interface only; however, it was more efficient and economical in the long run. 

Nonetheless, we didn’t forget about the client’s desire to change the look and feel of the website. In the end, we included its redesign in the scope of work after the third scoping session.

PROCESS & SOLUTION

After the clear presentation of pros and cons, the client appreciated the business benefits of the proposed solution and agreed to replace numerous systems with one source of truth covering the entire offer of properties and available services. 

The first pillar of the newly-built system is the Wagtail-based BackOffice Server which deals with storage and migration of data such as properties, operators, destinations, etc. The second part is the Pricing and Availability Calendar & Sales Dashboard – a frontend app that grants different permission levels to users with different roles, thus doing away with the need for two separate systems (initially there were two applications that we integrated into one tool). As the dashboard is integrated with an external API, it also reduces the share of manual work needed for defining prices and availabilities of respective properties. The third pillar is the Leo Trippi website, which we developed and designed from scratch, bearing in mind the findings of the usability audit. In this case, we focused on improving information architecture, navigation, and mobile experience.

When choosing a tech stack for this particular project, we wanted to lay the foundation for its further development and scalability, which is one of the reasons why we went for Python and Django on the backend. Thanks to the use of ReactJS and REST APIs for data distribution, on the other hand, we ensured continuous communication among all applications and data consistency. Last but not least, we set up the system on a custom AWS infrastructure which ensures reliability, security, and improved performance. 

To best address Leo Trippi’s needs, we put together a dedicated team of UX and UI designers, frontend and backend developers, a QA specialist, and a Project Manager. We followed Scrum best practices throughout the development process and held regular meetings such as planning, review, or retro to stay as flexible and productive as possible. Our work was divided into 2-week sprints, and the progress was regularly logged into Jira. 

ALL DETAILS OF THE PROJECT: https://www.merixstudio.com/work/leo-trippi/

Unibo is a powerful yet user-friendly system for increasing player engagement and retention with a single unified back office. The solution was created with two types of users in mind: online casino players and back office staff, particularly casino managers taking care of marketing campaigns. 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.

PROBLEM TO SOLVE

The player experience was suffering due to visual inconsistency, leading to ineffective customer acquisition and retention. Additionally the team had  to use different back offices and that’s a huge challenge to master a couple of tools at once. Due to this situation the chance of human errors was constantly increasing. What’s more, the available solutions often didn’t support mobile devices.

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

PROCESS & SOLUTION

Our cooperation began with an intense product design workshop attended by Unibo’s C-level executives and our team. The two-day-long session aimed to collect all information needed for the development of the data aggregation and gamification platform. 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.

After releasing MVP, and before the next stage we’ve met F2F once again to discuss the next features in more detail and plan work accordingly to business goals and timeline. To ensure the highest quality of cooperation, we composed a versatile team of IT specialists, including developers, designers, QA specialists, and a PM.

ALL DETAILS OF THE PROJECT:

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

Our Client, one of the world’s Mobile Banking leaders and pioneers, reached out to Merixstudio with a need for an experienced Angular development team that could serve as a supportive team extension and help to accelerate the velocity of their internal team.

PROBLEM TO SOLVE

The key challenges were:

• smoothly and quickly aligning themselves with the existing team and codebase,
• writing a highly scalable and robust code (taking care of testing and app’s maintenance) that can be on the par with fast company development.

PROCESS & SOLUTION

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.

ALL DETAILS OF THE PROJECT: https://www.merixstudio.com/work/mobile-banking-application

Sendinblue is an innovative Saas solution that empowers small and medium-sized businesses to build relationships through marketing campaigns, transactional messaging and marketing automation. Sendinblue was acclaimed 14th Fastest Growing Company in Europe by the Financial Times (2018).  

PROBLEM TO SOLVE

The Client reached out to Merixstudio with a need for qualified support in a rapid scale-up of the startup. The key challenge for Merixstudio was to smoothly and quickly align themselves with the existing product and maintain collaborative work in a culturally-diverse multi-timezone setup.

PROCESS & SOLUTION

Merixstudio’s team was responsible for the 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.

We have composed a dedicated, self-managed team, including Scrum Master, UX designer, QA specialists, front-end and back-end engineers. The headcount varied between 7 and 10 as the team size was adjusted to the current project needs. The biggest extension concerned QA and UX teams, which resulted from the necessity to audit the client’s design and perform automated UI tests. More detailed information on team fluctuations is presented in the chart below.

One of the major challenges of the project was the effective remote cooperation of teams located in Poland, France and India. To successfully handle the workflow with an almost 5-hour time zone difference, all sides needed to understand the crucial role of communication and fully comply with the jointly agreed terms of cooperation. We achieved tangible results by harnessing the best Agile and Scrum practices, in particular:

• organizing our work into 2-week sprints that synchronized planning-related activities, increased our focus and allowed us to update our thinking,
• conducting daily meetings with dedicated people from all teams to keep up-to-date with the development process
• setting up several channels on Slack to cover different topics for constant communication
• keeping the essential information about tasks and processes in JIRA and Confluence
• arranging regular reviews to demonstrate the effects of work, update the status of the project and collaborate on the plan ahead

ALL DETAILS OF THE PROJECT: https://www.merixstudio.com/work/sendinblue

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. 

PROBLEM TO SOLVE

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

PROCESS & SOLUTION

Our collaboration began with an intense product discovery workshop. As a means of achieving his goal, the client dreamed up a web app that would simplify the process of finding the solar energy provider whose quality-price ratio is the highest. Selfmade Energy’s founder arrived equipped with extensive demographic data as well as a thorough understanding of the legal matters and the German renewable energy market. This, matched with the inquisitiveness and the experience of the project team, significantly sped up the discovery process. 

Within two days, we chose a relevant tech stack, defined system architecture, and proposed the best design solutions. Another outcome worth mentioning is a very precise estimation which, bearing in mind that the Selfmade Energy was a budget-sensitive project, was the core of successful collaboration with the client. As Dr. Rosengard was open to the agile approach, we exceeded the budget slightly in the end. This, however, was the result of enriching the web app with new functionality for the benefit of the users.

Owing to the socio-economic conditions in Germany, the target audience of Selfmade Energy's product includes middle-aged owners of detached houses. Bearing that – as well as the fact that the choice of a PV installer is rarely made on the go – in mind, we decided on a desktop-first solution. For the backend of the web app, we chose Python/Django, to facilitate the integration of the product with the third-party API. The adopted solutions lowered the cost of development and shortened the time of building an MVP to less than 4 months– which made them perfect for the core version of the product.

As Selfmade Energy aims at popularizing green energy, Dr. Rosengard wanted the product’s logo to convey the eco-friendly message as well. That’s how we came up with a simple yet meaningful logo: yellow, blue, and green shapes standing for the Sun, the PV module, and a house powered by green energy respectively. We incorporated the same hues in the app’s design. We paid special attention to making it clean which paid off when the end-users described the website as both appealing and usable. 

During the development process, we worked in 2-week-long sprints following the best SCRUM practices. Not only did we hold daily meetings for the project team, but we also involved the Client in the bi-weekly review meetings and the ad-hoc refinement sessions. Knowing the value of regular communication, our team of three developers, two designers, a QA specialist, and a project manager stayed in touch with the Client using Slack and Google Hangouts.

At the moment, the Selfmade Energy comparison system is being improved according to the user feedback and is about to enter the German renewable energy market. It’s worth mentioning that rather than charging the end-users, its founder chose to implement a referral fee business model – a decision that is bound to support his quest for the popularization of solar energy.

ALL DETAILS OF THE PROJECT: https://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.
 

PROBLEM TO SOLVE

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.

PROCESS & SOLUTION

When you’ve been building a platform for years it is not easy or sometimes even viable to go from a monolith to full microservices right away. Such an operation could consume too much time and resources and basically is quite risky. But an API Gateway is a necessary step forward in creating a distributed system. The new service should do everything that the bookingkit’s API could do. 

So we then, we knew the issues and the main goal. The question that stood was: “How exactly are we going to achieve that?”. To find the complete answer couple of steps were needed. It all started with an intensive technical workshop. 

The first concept we’ve discussed was creating a service that would not only mimic the existing API but would also be a copy of the whole database, in that case combining all the data that was supposed to be sharded into a number of instances connected to it.

After the workshops and a couple of talks, it became apparent that we should validate the assumptions with a Proof of Concept (the chosen tech was Flask, a Python framework). The results were somewhat pleasing, but still, we saw potential issues with performance, overall high complexity of the new service and other risks regarding data integrity and migrations.

Another technical meeting was held in our office after which it was decided to verify the lighter version of the service. Only this time it was supposed to “just” relay all the requests to the instances behind it and combine the responses into one. Also in search of better performance, this time we’ve decided to compare two techs - Python and Golang. 

That was the moment when it “clicked”, not only had we confirmed the solution to be the right fit, but we also found that choosing Go can yield surprisingly better results - the TTFB was twice as fast as the solution using Python.

Verified concepts:

1. (proof of concept 1) Creating an API service next to bookingkit - requires replicating current API and database in a new service - issues: database synchronization concerns, data migration, latency
2. (proof of concept 2) Creating an API gateway proxying the requests from the Internet to all instances of bookingkit application and serving unified responses - quicker to implement, fewer concerns about data consistency

Considered technologies:

1. Python (Flask) - turned out to be too slow compared to Golang, response latencies were too long
2. Go - it was a lot of faster than python, relatively fast in implementation, “built-in” asynchronicity

API gateway proxying and aggregating data to/from instances was created. The programming language chosen was Golang, infrastructure that was also a big part of the solution is in AWS (AWS ECS), we also prepared robust CI/CD pipeline with automated tests of the whole API written in Cypress, automated performance tests in k6, automatic deployment from the pipeline to staging/production environments. Everything was also automated in Terraform.

ALL DETAILS OF THE PROJECT: https://www.merixstudio.com/work/bookingkit/

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. 

PROBLEM TO SOLVE

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.

PROCESS & SOLUTION

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.

ALL DETAILS OF THE PROJECT: https://www.merixstudio.com/work/hospitality-wellness-mobile-app/

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. 

PROBLEM TO SOLVE

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.

PROCESS & SOLUTION

Netvico’s demand for top-notch Javascript competencies concluded in technological partnership with Merixstudio. We came up with a highly skilled team at short notice, learning the client’s business core and coming up with particular solutions not only in terms of engineering but also in team management, tests, and communication.

Our Angular/Node.js engineers have been widely introduced into the business context of the Digital Signage service. The team conducted a 2-day scoping session to perform a smaller, test-drive project which leads us to ongoing collaboration.

We agreed on cutting-edge technologies (Angular, Node.js, TypeScript, Express, WebSockets, and Docker) and also Electron for displaying video content specifically on the screens within shopping centers. Next, we composed a small team with high involvement of Quality Assurance specialists responsible for integration and unit tests. The newly composed agile team start working following scrum methodology - conducting dailies, refinements, sprint plannings as well as other scrum ceremonies. The product ownership is undertaken by the client, playing the role of PO in scrum flow. Delivering requirements and providing feedback are maintained in a daily based communication, involving video-conferences and constant Slack correspondence.

The team’s effort is focused on the most important parts of the service: Booking, Playlist, Preview, Locations, and Media Data Bank. In a competitive market, increasing the performance of the service, introducing it to various kinds of displays and monitors must be compromised with the various contexts of usage as well as different tech-savviness of the users.

ALL DETAILS OF THE PROJECT: https://www.merixstudio.com/work/netvico

Snappt provides a new approach to the rental application and leasing process by using state-of-the-art technology that enables landlords to streamline applicant screening. This data-driven tenant screening helps property managers identify fraudulently modified documents and minimize losses from fraud. The key issue addressed by Snappt boils down to the question: how can you get the best resident possible in the shortest amount of time? The software supports landlords in filling vacancies faster, avoiding evictions and ensuring compliance in a time-efficient way. This gives them a strong advantage in a highly competitive rental market and an ability to scale their business efficiently.

PROBLEM TO SOLVE

The key challenges were:

• taking over the legacy Python project from the outgoing team making it smooth and downtime-free,
• quickly aligning themselves with the existing codebase to reach the key milestone which brought a high value for end-users and supported the client’s strategic goals,
• managing the project and collaborating across a 9-hour time difference.

PROCESS & SOLUTION

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.

Afterward, 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.

ALL DETAILS OF THE PROJECT: https://www.merixstudio.com/work/snappt

Walaro Software is a Swedish warehouse space leasing solution for both B2C - private consumers who are looking for storage space; and B2B - operators who want to reach a larger pool of customers. The product automates the process of booking storage facilities and makes it easier and more accessible for both individuals and companies. As the self-storage business is not too digitalized, we needed to take on a consumer perspective and solve the issues and challenges that someone might have when looking to rent storage space.

PROBLEM TO SOLVE

We were challenged with:

• creating an MVP version of the project in a time-efficient manner so that the client can acquire early customers, and gather feedback for future development,
• supporting the client with creating the marketing material for the operators to encourage them to use the application and unlock the potential of the B2B-oriented part of the platform.
• working on further version 2 of the project.

PROCESS & SOLUTION

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 our 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. 

ALL DETAILS OF THE PROJECT: https://www.merixstudio.com/work/walaro

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.

StudyBee's primary goal is to make teachers’ job simple, clear and flexible by reducing their workload and streamlining the assessment process.

PROBLEM TO SOLVE

The key challenges were:

• building a stable tech solution that heavily depends on a 3rd party Google Classroom API,
• creating the app that greatly fulfills its role i.e. reduces the workload for teachers and makes the assessment process simple, correct and more transparent for students,
• maintaining a high standard of remote collaboration and assuring transparent communication.

PROCESS & SOLUTION

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. 

ALL DETAILS OF THE PROJECT: https://www.merixstudio.com/work/studybee

Process General is a high-profile database of case information for lawyers and individuals involved in a bankruptcy proceeding. The founders of the application wanted to improve the accessibility of bankruptcy case information in order to streamline legal administration services and let lawyers achieve exceptional outcomes for clients in a more time-efficient way.

PROBLEM TO SOLVE

The key challenge for Merixstudio was:

• improving user experience by designing better usability and findability of data so that clients can attract more users and keep their retention high,
• redesigning Information Architecture and pointing a way of reshaping the app based on data-driven decisions,
• removing the pain points discovered during the workshop session e.g. the need for greater flexibility of the tool, work automation.

PROCESS & SOLUTION

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 fairground 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. 

ALL DETAILS OF THE PROJECT: https://www.merixstudio.com/work/process-general 

Evercoast is a US-based company unlocking the creation of volumetric content. Taking the volumetric video recording, rendering, streaming, and 3D model generation to an unprecedented level, Evercoast quickly became an industry leader by offering an end-to-end, fully-automated, and fast software solution, enabling a wide range of configurations for everything from face captures at home to full body 360 stages.

PROBLEM TO SOLVE

The client reached out to us to improve the scalability and efficiency of their rendering processes responsible for converting 2D images into 3D volumetric output. Back then, the rendering pipeline was capable of running only on one server. Given the amount of data to be processed and the idea of having a scalable SaaS solution, that was a big business and technology bottleneck. 

Evercoast decided to cooperate with us due to our strong competencies in Python web development and AWS, which allowed us to address the problems mentioned above.

PROCESS & SOLUTION

Merixstudio’s squad acts as a team extension accountable to the client’s Project Manager. Working with Evercoast, we follow an iterative release process, which means we can distinguish several components of our collaboration. The first would be boosting the pipeline that manages all of the client’s computer vision applications. Initially, the issue was the unbearable length of the sequential processing run on a single computer. Our team addressed it by using AWS – as a result, the 3D rendering pipeline can be completed much faster, using 1,000s of CPU cores.

Then, we proceeded to work on desktop and web applications. The former, created by Evercoast’s team, serve to record videos and transfer them to the cloud. In this case, our scope of work is limited to providing frontend support – one example may be introducing Snapcraft to ensure the quick and smooth installation of the app. Our main focus is the web application, which we’ve built from scratch and are currently engaged in its maintenance. Based on Python, Django, and Angular, this part of the Evercoast’s product is used for managing the assets and the resulting renders.

ALL DETAILS OF THE PROJECT:  https://www.merixstudio.com/work/evercoast/ .

Divio is a product company with offices in New York, Stockholm and Zürich that offers Divio Cloud - an autopilot for Django projects. Divio Cloud provides tools for the management, integration, and hosting to reduce environment set-up time and streamline a complicated deployment process. Except for this, Divio has created an open-source Django CMS used by thousands of websites since 2007 and this is what Merixstudio has been bringing value to. It 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).

PROBLEM TO SOLVE

The key challenges were:

• helping our client in accelerating velocity by (initially) serving as an extension to the existing development team,
• taking over the role of tech leads and consultants,
• working on a publicly available codebase and taking care of its compatibility with older versions.

PROCESS & SOLUTION

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.

ALL DETAILS OF THE PROJECT: https://www.merixstudio.com/work/divio

Our client (global stock content agency) had a vision of making a powerful branding available to everyone, regardless of skill level or background in design. Therefore, there arose a need for building a user-friendly AI-fuelled tool that empowers users to instantly and easily create good-looking custom-made logos.

PROBLEM TO SOLVE

The key challenges were:

• implementing good colour matching of particular elements within generated logos,
• allowing users to fine-tune selected logos,
• providing well-looking generated logos in vector graphic format.

PROCESS & SOLUTION

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 a 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.

ALL DETAILS OF THE PROJECT: www.merixstudio.com/work/logo-creator

Bronson Laboratories is a US-based international healthcare company founded in the 1960s. It is known for producing top-quality nutritional supplements, including vitamins, minerals, herbs, and health & body care products. Merixstudio contributed to the development of the e-commerce platform that makes Bronson’s products easily available.

PROBLEM TO SOLVE

Key challenges were:

• analyzing the previous site in terms of its general usability, flows, and habits of its users
• designing the entirely new user interface to improve the shopping experience of the existing users and to comply with the latest design trends
• creating an e-commerce solution that is friendly for users of different age groups
• integrating the application with an ERP system
• enriching the application with advanced external Magento modules so that we expand the platform functionalities in a budget and time-efficient way

PROCESS & SOLUTION

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 behavior 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.

ALL DETAILS OF THE PROJECT: https://www.merixstudio.com/work/bronson

Omnigame is a Denmark-based company that develops unique and superior online gaming solutions for the iGaming industry. Their games produce outstanding player engagement that is proven in their online casino pip.dk for which Merixstudio helped with developing four games with advanced awesome-looking animations.

PROBLEM TO SOLVE

The key challenges were: 

• building a vast number of advanced animations for game design in a time-efficient manner maintaining its high quality and performance (i.e., achieving 60fps on mobile),
• developing a technically robust solution (including performing integration with a slot machine generating real-time game results as well as preparing basics game-agnostic reusable mechanisms to reduce the overall software development time of consecutive games).

PROCESS & SOLUTION

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 to maximize 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 the 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. Although it was a remote-based collaboration, we built a strong partnership with the client’s team and hosted them regularly in our HQ once a couple of months for a planning and review sessions and for having a chance to work together in a different environment.

Merixstudio was also in charge of creating commercial video clips that were used in TV ads as well as promotional materials used in social media. Videos were produced with Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe After Effects.

ALL DETAILS OF THE PROJECT: https://www.merixstudio.com/work/omnigame

Up Your eGame is a premium quality connection platform for gamers and e-sports teams. The passionate-about-games founders of the platform wanted to make recruitment and team building easier for gamers. UYEG lets them spend less time selecting and organizing teammates and more time playing the games they love with the people they want to play with.

PROBLEM TO SOLVE

Merixstudio took a holistic approach to the project and led the Client through the A-to-Z process of product design, development, and post-release support. The key challenges were:

• translating the vague project idea into the ready-to-implement scope of work,
• designing the complex product that will meet users and business goals,
• assuring a smooth workflow for intensive cooperation with a 9-hour time difference,
• managing the project to fit a tight budget.

PROCESS & SOLUTION

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 a 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.

The project demonstrated how meaningful could be a strong UX support not only on the early stage when creating the shape of the app but also later when optimising the app based on GA or Hot Jar data.

ALL DETAILS OF THE PROJECT: https://www.merixstudio.com/work/up-your-egame

Our Danish client looked for a way to connect individuals, groups, and ideas from around the world into a community of communities. Hence he came up with Humanitrack - crowd-base project management and guidance tool for numerous humanity's problems and missions. The platform organizes and validates innovation news to identify new opportunities. Humanitrack doubles as a guide for where to invest our collective time, money, natural resources, ideas, education, and dreams.

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.

PROBLEM TO SOLVE

The key challenges were:

• designing and incorporating gamification elements to encourage users to return and keep them engaged on the Humanitrack website, 
• building an MVP with understanding the project’s financial limitations and suggesting ways to reduce costs while keeping technical and product debts low,
• creating a solid concept of gathering all necessary information about each humanity goal’s progress and presenting it in a simple and user-friendly manner

PROCESS & SOLUTION

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 to build 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.

ALL DETAILS OF THE PROJECT: https://www.merixstudio.com/work/humanitrack

Sheepblue is an Austria based company focusing on automated SaaS-driven employee scheduling, driven by Artificial Intelligence. The software brings value to companies in the Retail Sales, Transportation, Healthcare and Service industries by freeing the responsible managers from cumbersome manual planning work and avoiding social conflicts (like unfair scheduling, mobbing, etc.) because AI managing the schedule.

PROBLEM TO SOLVE

The Client reached out to Merixstudio with a need for an experienced agile software team that could serve as a supportive team extension and take ownership of the front-end development in order to increase the velocity of their internal team.

The key challenge for Merixstudio was to smoothly and quickly align themselves with the existing team and codebase and meet a strict deadline for the MVP release.

PROCESS & SOLUTION

The whole collaboration was based on a partnership between two teams: the experienced front-end development team seated in Poznan, Poland, and the back-end seated in Vienna, along with the core management team. Merixstudio’s team was in charge of the whole front-end development of the application covering the implementation of the key features (such as managing shift boards, creating and calculating shifts, displaying resources overviews) as well as of providing consultative tech advice and UX improvements. This was fully remote cooperation put in the framework of a Scrum-driven development.

ALL DETAILS OF THE PROJECT: https://www.merixstudio.com/work/sheepblue

Flavr is a Belgium-based start-up that is all about discovering local kitchen superheroes and connecting with others through food. This is a peer-to-peer marketplace that connects home chefs with food lovers who are given the opportunity to order and pick up meals from hobby chefs in their neighborhood. Flavr’s mission is to give a human touch to food delivery experience as they believe the people’s personalities are just as important as the food they create.

PROBLEM TO SOLVE

The key challenges were:

• meeting an ambitious deadline and releasing the MVP version of the project quickly so that the client can get early customers and gather feedback for future development,
• running intensive initial project preparation phase that, among other, covered workshops based design thinking approach,
• from a business perspective - growing both sides (chefs and consumers) of the platform quickly and balancing supply and demand.

PROCESS & SOLUTION

Our Client reached out to us with a request to develop an entire responsive web application based on proof of concept previously built with Firebase (a real-time back-end for applications) and given User Interfaces. In the beginning, we conducted Design Thinking workshops, during which we discussed in detail the concept of the application and the long-term vision of the whole product development.

It took us four months to ship the MVP of the application with enough features to gain early users and receive feedback for future development. After four months, we finished working on the full product version. Among others, in the scope of work was developing functionalities such as filters module, notifications, follow chef, admin panel and discount coupons. Payments used in the app were implemented with the use of Adyen Payment Gateway (Visa, Mastercard, Maestro/MisterCash).

During the whole project, we worked with Scrum methodology that assured an iterative and incremental product development keeping a holistic and flexible approach.

ALL DETAILS OF THE PROJECT: https://www.merixstudio.com/work/flavr

Competenz4u is SaaS e-learning application streamlining the process of learning maths for Austrian future high school graduates. Due to brand new school examination standards introduced in Austria (called 'Zentralmatura'), our Client took the initiative to create a modern e-learning web application that combines his incredible flair for sharing knowledge (hundreds of tutorials were recorded) and powerful Python development capabilities.

PROBLEM TO SOLVE

The key challenges were:

• building the MVP of the platform in a very time-efficient manner to meet a tight deadline (correlated with the school year’s workflow), 
• designing and incorporating gamification elements to keep students’ engagement and learning progress high,
• assuring secure and performant video streaming so that the materials are kept within the platform and are easily operated by the target users (videos are a core of the client’s business and the value delivered).

PROCESS & SOLUTION

At Merixstudio, we've proudly built a Django platform that reinvented the current learning schemas giving students access to affordable, concise, and user-friendly maths training videos via a recurring monthly subscription program. Competenz4u solves a serious problem of the not adjusted curriculum to the reformed maths school-leaving examination (“Zentralmatura”) standards. The application teaches step by step strategies on how to solve the new system’s exercises. The ultimate goal was to increase student’s success rate in the examination.  Competenz4u has been the first initiative of its kind in Austria.

The Python development process was preceded by a product design online workshop session that let us learn the client's objectives and discuss solutions and ways of achieving it. We decided to keep a UX/UI design progress two sprints ahead of the devs’ work. Axure RP was used to design logo and animated clickable wireframes which then served as a base for creating the detailed project’s specification by a project manager. 

We applied a fair amount of flexibility as regards the project’s management and juggled between waterfall and agile (depending on the project’s phase and current needs). Similarly, the team’s headcount was adjustable and varied from 3 to 5 members in peak time.

The Django-powered MVP platform has been well-received by students who shared very meaningful feedback. The success of this ed-tech startup encouraged our client to improve and expand it with new features, such as affiliate mechanism and gamification that increased user activity, retention, and overall advocacy.

ALL DETAILS OF THE PROJECT: https://www.merixstudio.com/work/competenz4u/