Author: Anthony Bull

Categories
Architecture demand-side eCommerce Frontend Full-Stack Innovation Machine Learning Management

Delivering AI

(CrowdFlower : 8/15-9/15)

In late August 2015, given previous successes in the year, I was tapped to lead the engineering team for delvering a conference-ready AI deliverable by early October.

In the months leading up to that, the CTO had been prototyping an intial verion of the app in Rails which, for the conference, was to supposed to be integrated with other legacy apps (Rails 3.2 and Merb) and have its UI overhauled to be compliant with the newly-created company Styleguide.

Week 1

  • Given Balsamiq wireframes, put together a few layouts
  • Put basic routes in place
  • Began architecting common styling solution between AI app and legacy apps
basics coming together

Week 2

  • Continued work on common styling
  • Made choices aobut JS libs and prototyped interactions given wireframes; got buy-in from CTO, Product, and Design
  • Began work integrating with ML Python web service

first index page of models

Week 3

  • Given higher-resolution mockups by Designer, started to polish look-and-feel
  • With architecture in place, began to parcel work out to other engineers

first version of export

Week 4

  • As conference neared, knew we weren’t going to be able to deliver everything; worked with Product to focus on MVP
  • Oversaw work of other engineers

adding data to the model

Week 5

  • Continued to lead other engineers and refine interactions
annotating a model

Week 6

  • Applied final polish
  • Delivered for the conference! Following are a few screenshots demonstrating some of the deliverables

Results

  • Led team in coordination with CTO to deliver AI application (Rails) for company-sponsored conference on Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and Data Science.
Categories
demand-side eCommerce Frontend Leadership SPAs

WYSIWIG Platform UI

(CrowdFlower : 7/15-8/15)

The team knew that our most-important customer-facing UI needed an overhaul. Approximately a year before, a contractor had come in to attempt that. His prototype, built early in 2014 in React, lay dormant because it had not had a project champion to fully see it into production. In the summer of 2015, the timing was right for our team (with me as the Tech Lead) to pick up the banner and carry it forward.

We revisited the prototype, shown below

No usability tests had been done on it so we didn’t really know how customers would take to it. Product handed us a design and we promptly set about its realization.

Though I attempted to introduce the use of Webpack and Hot Loading, given how much re-writing would have been necessary to move from the Sprockets dependency management paradigm of Rails to that of Webpack and with the looming deadline, that intitiative had to be abandoned.

We made progress as we extracted some modal functionality into a right-hand pane.

The UX really began to come together: the following screen capture demonstrates one of the key interactions.

We launched something similar (but more polished, see doc link) and that is running in production.

Results

  • Led a team of three Rails engineers (two local, one remote) to upgrade and overhaul a React app towards improving usability and throughput in the system.
Categories
Architecture Collaboration demand-side Distributed Teams eCommerce Innovation Process SOA

Legacy App Port

(CrowdFlower : 4/15-8/15)

In the Spring of 2015, seven years after the company’s inception and three years after the intital movement towards an SOA paradigm and away from the monolith Merb app (essential to the company’s business,) the architectual shift was still not finished.

Towards further paying down the tech debt of needing to maintain that app, I lobbied for, organized, and oversaw the extraction of the final presentation layer components into a more modern, more maintainable Rails app.

While not quite the magnitude of the previous major refresh, I recognized it would still be a mammoth effort. In order to attack the port, I created a spreadsheet project plan, inventorying all platform routes torwards prioritizing for the eight most-important, portable, customer-facing routes.

Following is a before-and-after example of what was achieved across those eight routes over four months.

Results

  • Secured adoption by CTO, VP PROD, Lead Engineer, and VPE to port view layer from legacy Merb app to Rails app.
Categories
demand-side eCommerce Frontend Full-Stack Innovation Leadership Process supply-side

Key UX Upgrade

(CrowdFlower : 6/15-7/15)

After two years of usage, the company could tell that the paradigm previously introduced had led to improved Usability overall of the product but users were still confused about workflow.

After having tackled the welcome, we launched into rolling out a complete overhaul of the UX, moving from a left nav Master-Detail paradgigm to a top-nav Subway-Map approach.

The main challenge with rolling out a new UX was that it had to happen for both a Rails and a Merb application. Neither uses the same paradigm when it comes to layout so the approach had to be adapted to each and yet made general enough to not incur (even more than was already present) tech debt.

I served as Tech Lead and architected a solution, led other junior engineers in implementation, and managed interactions and expectation with Product and Design.

Following is a general impression of where we began and where we wound up

Results

  • Led engineering efforts around a complete UX overhaul of the company’s most important customer interaction.
Categories
APIs eCommerce Frontend Leadership supply-side

NUX Refresh

CrowdFlower : 5/15-5/15)

Our NUX had seen a revamp in the previous major refresh, but we tackled it for a re-design in order to

  1. give our newly-onboarded Visual Designer an opportunity to get his hands dirty with crafting a visual identity direction and
  2. get a sense of the effort for introducing a new layout as it would eventually affect two very heterogenous apps

What it was like before

Here’s a first pass as I took the Designer’s vision and implemented it as a new layout, complete with Zendesk API integration to create a ticket on form post

If you login to CrowdFlower, you can see the final product at https://make.crowdflower.com/welcome

Results

  • Worked with Designer to implement new NUX.
Categories
demand-side eCommerce Frontend Growth

Funnel Changes

(Bluxome Labs : 5/14-6/14)

Following is a representative control version of the signup

Here are the variations as implemented

Before
Before

Unfortunately, none performed better than control.

Results

  • Tested signup improvements by adding breadcrumbs, hypothesizing that users were bouncing because they lacked contextual information.
Categories
Innovation Mobile supply-side

First Android App

(Bluxome Labs : 6/14-6/14)

Below is the home screen as seen in the Android emulator.

Following is the landing screen as seen in the Android emulator.

Results

  • Prototyped company’s first mobile (Hybrid) application using PhoneGap.
Categories
Backend Innovation Prototyping supply-side

Community Building

(Bluxome Labs : 5/14-6/14)

To facilitate migration between Yahoo Groups and Kinsights group functionality for a key account, I created a Command Line Interface tool for a paginated approach to parsing and importing the member list in addition to parsing and importing the archived messages (for the last seven years.)

Many iterations were necessary and several heuristic methods were applied in order to ensure the cleanest import of the messages

Additionally, I created the activation flow for the transition, partially by piecing together signup components from the existing codebase, partially by crafting new logic in the business layer.

Results

  • Created CLI tool to ingest 1,000s of Yahoo Groups users given numerous different, undocumented email schemas.
Categories
Emails supply-side

Growth Activities

(Bluxome Labs : 4/14-6/14)

Email sent to discover Net Promoter Score.

Email sent to discover product/market fit.

JavaScript alert interrupting user to take survey.

JavaScript modal for simple survey.

Results

  • Executed email campaigns for marketing research.
Categories
Growth NUX supply-side

Social NUX

(Bluxome Labs : 5/14-6/14)

Did not actually implement social signup, merely checked for clicks on buttons (using Optimizely to show/hide based on whichever variation user was assigned.)

With social signup options above:

With social signup options below:

Results

  • Tested conversion hypotheses with social signup buttons.