Responsive Design, Mortal Kombat, and new Eko Tech: A chat with Eko’s Experience Design Lead Joe Tresca
We’re beyond excited to chat with Joe Tresca, eko’s Experience Design Lead as he discusses his early career, life at eko, and new eko technology he and his team have been working on. Joe is a classically trained artist and video game designer who became an engineer and ultimately a UX designer.
Ok, so who is Joe Tresca?
“I’m a traditional artist who fell in love with digital art back in the late 90s. This has led me through a rather unorthodox career path where I held many jobs as an Illustrator, Print Layout Designer, 3D Artist, Animator, Video Editor, Post Production Video Effects Designer, Web Designer, and Advertising Creative Director. Eventually, I found myself taking on more of a design strategy role as a User Experience Designer. Back in 2013, I was hired as a Visual Designer for a company called GLG. Not 6 months in, my entire department was dissolved and I was asked if I wanted to learn how to code. Nearly 7 years after that, I became a front-end focused full-stack engineer right around the time when web components through Angular, Polymer, React and Vue single-page applications were beginning to shape the web programming world we know today.”
Let’s get this out of the way, why is there a Mortal Kombat arcade machine sitting behind you in all of your Zoom calls?
“Well, I’m a gamer through and through. Back in the early 90s, I held a local record for winning 144 games in a row on Mortal Kombat 2 in the arcades.
Mortal Kombat holds a special place in my heart. I run a video game studio called Eyeballistic, which produces PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, and PC games on nights and weekends, and I came very close to convincing Warner Brothers to let my scrappy team of Mortal Kombat fans remake the original game in HD. Ultimately it didn’t work out, but that’s a longer story for another time!”
How does being a gamer and game developer influence your job as UX Lead at eko?
“I read a fantastic book called “Reality is Broken” by Jane McGonigal that sums up why gamers will rule the world. I’m paraphrasing here, but Jane says gamers are the only group that finds solving real-world problems so mundane that they actively seek to challenge themselves to solve made-up problems. Gamers are like bodybuilders strengthening their problem-solving skills each time they play, and the games are their gym.
Games need to have just the right balance of intrigue, challenge, and meaningful choices (big or small) to be fun. One of the key tenets to why eko’s interactive video-based tech captures incredibly high engagement with client’s products is because it appeals to the kid in all of us.
Choice-based interactivity ignites that sense of wonder and the entertainment users feel when in control of the experience. It’s something that most of us have only ever felt when playing a game.”
What’s the best part of working at eko?
“I’m surrounded by some incredibly smart people and the executive leadership team is simply as good as it gets. I wouldn’t be here though if I didn’t believe in the product. Eko is making a strategic shift from being entertainment-focused into a SaaS platform. Most people know about our partnership with Walmart, but we’ve recently partnered with Microsoft, Oculus, Pinterest, and Lego to produce some outstanding experiences that drive engagement through the roof. I’m talking about a 20–25% increase in engagement!
I like to tell this story about my 9-year-old son, Justin when I first started at eko. It was the middle of the pandemic and I did some work for Walmart Wonderlab — an eko-powered virtual toy store where kids can play with close to 50 different toys. To my amazement he made it his goal to see and play with every single toy — virtually interacting with them as if he had the toys in his own hands. After over 2 hours I asked him if this was better or worse than actually driving to Walmart to see the toys first hand. He said, “This is waaaay better. When we go to the store I can’t take the toys out of the box to play with them.” I think the light bulb went on for me when he said that, and I felt I had firsthand experience with why our product is such a game-changer, especially now.”
Can you share what you’ve been doing at eko lately? What exactly is a “Try & Buy”?
“Lately I’ve been working with the Try & Buy team to expand eko’s offering to clients outside the Walmart ecosystem. Try & Buys are small interactive eko projects that focus on all of the features of a particular product. For instance, if you’re selling a fancy coffee maker, we’ll have interactive buttons that’ll let a potential customer learn (through interactive video) how easy it is to clean or how quickly it brews a cup of coffee. The first iteration of these types of products was limited to very specific sizes that they could be displayed at. They weren’t responsive so viewing and interacting with them on your phone was frankly a poor user experience. If you turned your phone from portrait to landscape the experience was just about unusable. What about if you wanted these mini demonstrations to live anywhere but on the product page, like somewhere inside of a social media advertisement? How could we meet the unique pixel height and width specifications of advertising on Instagram versus Pinterest? Another question was how could we encourage sales conversions by offering some frictionless and immediate way to add the product to the shopper’s virtual cart and have it sent to them immediately if they wanted to buy it? I’m proud to say we’ve overcome all of these challenges now.”
Let’s break this down. What’s responsive design and why is it important to eko?
“The short answer is that responsive design uses cascading style sheets to allow one website to scale to fit the bounds of whatever screen, resolution, or orientation your web page or application displays on. Almost a decade and a half ago, it would not have been uncommon to have a separate mobile version of your website to complement the native application and desktop version. So making changes required updates to three different versions at once and it was a logistical nightmare from an upkeep standpoint. With the features of CSS3 such as flexbox and CSS grid, we’ve come to expect that one website will smoothly scale and rearrange web page elements for an optimal viewing experience whether on a desktop computer or mobile device.
Eko’s challenge with responsive design is a bit more involved though. Not only do we need to be mindful of the interactive buttons resizing, over-laying, and arranging themselves properly at any device aspect ratio you can imagine, but also the product videos must be filmed in such a way to allow for them to be cropped or stretched to fit any screen size as well.
Through lots of trial and error and with the help of several different departments at eko, we’ve cracked the code, and this will have a massive impact on where our eko projects can live. We’re no longer limited to embedding our player on just a product page, now we can embed our player just about anywhere, including a range of social media platforms.”
Can you expand on the commerce functionality you mentioned earlier?
“Absolutely! We’ve developed a way to integrate with just about any REST-based API to pull product pictures, pricing data, reviews, and direct add to cart functionality right into advertisements that run on social media platforms such as Pinterest. This is sort of the holy grail of product marketing because it allows for in-ad purchasing! Imagine watching a commercial on your television and after being convinced you want whatever they are selling, you tap to add it to your cart and buy it from your favorite vendor. That kind of direct conversion used to be something product marketers could only dream about, but now it’s our reality.”
What’s in store for the future?
“Gamification is hugely important to us at eko and I’m excited to be a part of those discussions. We’re looking into incentivizing consumers to share product feedback via built-in NPS scoring which should help our product distributors get a read on customer sentiment. Above all, we’re eager to demonstrate how eko’s choice-based interactive product videos can drive engagement, shop intent, and conversions for product distributors both large and small.”
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We hope that you enjoyed our chat with Joe as much as we did! It’s always a pleasure to sit and talk with our team about the skills that brought them to eko and what they’ve accomplished thus far. Interested in learning more about the eko team? Stay tuned!
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