A Day in the Life of an Interactive Display Designer that Uses Intuiface - Edward Mekker

Edward Mekker is a user experience and user interactive display designer for WAKETO, a Munich, Germany-based consulting firm specialized in digital marketing. He is also WAKETO’s main Intuiface designer. In his own words, he takes us behind the scenes, walking us through a day in his life as an Intuiface designer.

●     What is your official job title, and what does it entail?

I’m the head of UX / UI Development at WAKETO. I am responsible for our development tools – especially Intuiface

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●     What kind of training and experience did you have before working as an Intuiface designer?

I originally came from the world of Web and App Development and I fell in love with Intuiface when I was experimenting with some new interesting tools to create outstanding touch applications.

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●     Describe your desk setup?

I use a Windows 10Pro Notebook running Intel Core i7 with 32GB DDR4 RAM and a 512GB M2 SSD. I equipped it with an Nvidia RTX 2070 graphics card with 8GB memory.  

I use two screens for composing, and another one, a touch screen, for live testing.

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●     What software (if any) do you use to supplement your work with Intuiface?

I use Adobe Cloud, especially Media Encoder, Photoshop, XD, Flash, Dreamweaver… It’s a classic development setup and works great with Intuiface.

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●     Do you work independently on a project or depend on collaboration with others in your company?

For Intuiface projects, I work with our design team, developers, and of course our content team for images/movies/animations, etc.

●     How often do you test and report the progress of your work to your team?

We normally have one weekly jour fixe every Monday morning – but when we are on the development phase of an Intuiface project, I daily report progress with live testing in our Digital Lab (Showroom) to see how it works with the user flow and animations inaction.

●     How and when do you engage with your clients about the progress of your Intuiface projects? How (what/when) do you share with them?

Well, we have different steps on a project. The first step is the design phase, where we finalize the design and UX. After this, we move on to developing the experience and perform two progress checks with the client. The first progress check is made through sharing a video of the experience, and the final check is done through live testing. We share the experience in progress with the client during the second phase, enabling them to test it remotely.

●      What are the sources of the graphic media you use?

Our design team is responsible for both design and content. For example, our content creator builds 3D images or any other media required by a client.

●     If you work with third-party content management systems, do you have a preference?

Wordpress is my favorite and works great with Intuiface. We often work with Wordpress as a CMSon our projects, so we are very familiar with the system. For example, we used it to make e-commerce extensions for two of our clients, SLYRS Whiskey and Lanten hammer Distillery.

●      What is one productivity tip you’d recommend to all Intuiface users?

My one surefire tip for the best productivity is to feel free to make errors.

●     What have you learned about Intuiface that you wish you knew in the early days of your use?

I learned about the secret behind the .ifx and .ifxp files located in each Intuiface project.  As of today, when deploying an experience to client-owned Players using the Share and Deploy Console, the deployed experience can be opened and edited in Composer. This is a big problem because we want to protect our work from third-party reuse. As it turns out, if we manually supply customers with a copy of an experience after first removing the .ifx file and only leaving in the .ifxp file, Player and Composer can play the experience but Composer cannot edit it.

(Editor’s Note:Starting with Version 6.5, deployed experiences will only contain an encrypted version of the .ifx file, preventing future edits in Composer.)

●     What (if any) Intuiface feature would you like to see in the future?

I hope the text editing feature will soon include line spacing and character spacing. The TextAsset improved a lot with the recent addition of the AdaptiveText feature, but the moment when it comes to the spacing, everything has to be done through HTML, and this is a real headache.

●     What would you want to know about an applicant if you were interviewing candidates for a job using Intuiface?

What we focus on the most when creating Intuiface experiences are performance and animation. So, we would want to know if the applicant is passionate about these things.

●     What’s your favorite music to listen to while working on Intuiface projects?

Sometimes hip-hop/soul, sometimes classic film music ;-) It depends on the type of project!

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