Categories
eCommerce Frontend Growth Innovation supply-side

Product Page Improvements

(Shop It To Me : 10/11-11/11)

To keep the user on-network, we created an on-site details page. We explored different MVPs which partially leveraged the metadata already present in our inventory, partially as they were intended to aggregate content from the retailers.

Here are a few concepts we vetted as MVPs

The following screenshot shows that we even tried our hand at soliciting reviews as UGC

… before finally settling on this as the (now retired) final product.

Results

  • created an on-site details page to boost checkout conversion
  • worked 1:1 with Product to prioritize features
  • prototyped MVPs using Photoshop
  • implemented all aspects of the frontend under a sprint schedule
Categories
eCommerce Frontend Growth Innovation Prototyping supply-side

Popup Shop

(Shop It To Me : 7/11-8/11)

With a number of in-house domain experts in the world of fashion, we decided to put that knowledge to use by having Product curate items into pop-up shops, or internally known as events.

I built the web frontend as well as the CRUD tool for management.

basic popup-shop example

Results

  • Created a popup-shop infrastructure
  • Implemented admin tool for Product to curate events using apparel items from our database
  • Added features as A/B-tested experiments to drive clicks
Categories
Backend eCommerce Emails Frontend Innovation Prototyping supply-side

Deal of the Day

(Shop It To Me : 6/11-8/11)

Conceived as a framework for local deals, we pivoted to a daily deal paradigm leveraging our apparel inventory when the market opportunity presented itself. This lead to revenue generation via several 100K impressions/day.

Initially, Product curated deals by hand and as market potential was proven for the idea, we built an infrastructure for algorithmically selecting 100s of deals/day (based on signals such as open and click activity) and gave Product a way to QA the deals.

Here is an example of the ‘Deal of the Day’ in the ‘spotlight’ position of our flagship email product (click to view)

Results

  • built the original (local, pre-Groupon) deal POC infrastructure, front-to-back
  • assumed maintenance responsbilities
  • collaborated with Product to address bugs and implement additional features, most notably: ‘stackable’ deals
  • implemented admin tool for Product to QA deals
  • coined the term ‘spotlight’ now used internally to refer to the real estate occupied by the deal
Categories
eCommerce Frontend supply-side

Faceted Navigation

(Shop It To Me : 3/11-5/11)

Built in Prototype JS, the Shop It To Me Search experience provides users with a specificity to formulate search parameters.

You’ll see in the following screenshot (click to view) filters for price, discount, clothing type, brand, and retailer.

The product had been built well before I joined the company, but I took over maintenance and support for it.

Results

  • maintained company’s faceted search SPA
Categories
eCommerce Frontend Growth Prototyping supply-side

Structured Search

(Shop It To Me : 3/11-5/11)

Our Search product is a good one, but we want to give users even more power to find what they’re looking for, so we devised “On The Lookout.”

To begin with, we sent out several variations of invite emails (like the following) to a small sample set of our userbase.

We leveraged our flagship email product as a marketing channel for this initiative as well; here’s what it looked like as a ‘hook’ for a user to set their search query

… and here are four of the variations of landing pages we tested as the user would see them from the ‘hook’

Once a search query was chosen, the user would then see something like the following in their next email

This product has been retired.

Results

  • implemented novel way allowing user to explicitly formulate a structured search query
Categories
demand-side Frontend Innovation Prototyping

Hackathon : Tweet Dashboard

(Shop It To Me : 3/11-5/11)

Built in Prototype JS, the Shop It To Me Search experience provides users with a specificity to formulate search parameters.

You’ll see in the following screenshot (click to view) filters for price, discount, clothing type, brand, and retailer.

The product had been built well before I joined the company, but I took over maintenance and support for it.

Results

  • maintained company’s faceted search SPA
Categories
crm eCommerce Frontend Prototyping supply-side

First Subscription Product

(Shop It To Me : 5/10-7/10)

Since retired, the product was the first foray into the world of premium subscriptions. We went through 35 variations of the invite email while experimenting, five of the landing page, and several promotional creatives embedded within the flagship email product.

Here’s one example invite (click to view larger):

The product has been retired.

Results

  • implemented company’s first subscription product
  • Created a Chrome browser extension (using jQuery based on ease-of-namespacing) as a complementary value-added delivery channel
  • Delivered HTML promo emails, details/purchase/confirmation pages (models, views, and controllers,) CRUD admin tool, and gateway payment processing via ActiveMerchant and Braintree (including mid-tier error-handling logic)
  • Validated emails with EmailReach
Categories
demand-side Frontend

Display Advertising

(Yahoo! : 1/10-5/10)

Galaxy is a component of Yahoo! Mail (one of the most complicated MVC apps in JavaScript on the planet) as part of Rushmore that enables consumption of events from both the Yahoo and Facebook networks without having to leave Mail. As part of the Tiger Team, I was brought in as a F2E to help meet deadlines by implementing features.

Results

  • Contributed to the most important RIA in the display advertising industry (at the time)
  • adding and testing front-end functionality in Yahoo Mail
  • ensuring cross-browser compatibility for IE 6/7/8 on XP Vista, Safari 4, and Firefox 2/3
  • helping to improve the team’s recruitment and hiring processes

 

Categories
crm eCommerce Frontend Growth NUX supply-side

Improving the Acquisition Funnel

(Shop It To Me : 2/10-5/10)

Our four-page flow has proven itself time and again, but in order to drive even more signups, I’ve put in experiments on

  • the number and styles of brands a user can choose from (step two)
  • the messaging (copy) and layout (throughout signup)
  • the types and number of mandatory sizes and categories a user must choose (step three)
  • the form fields of the profile creation (step four, final)
  • content and layout of the confirmation email received by the user
  • …and others

Below you’ll find just a sample of these kinds of experiments.

Here are three of the five variations on our final step, the profile page, in a bid to leverage the SSO benefits of FB Connect (click for larger views)

For one experiment in the signup process, we attempted to simplify choosing brands by creating style profiles. The idea was to make it easier for users to signup based on some curated indices (click for a larger view)

Here are a couple of the many landing-page variations we’ve tried when a potential new user is referred from a friend (click for larger view.)

In the following example, we have the original confirmation email as contrasted with a simple design (of my own) I implemented (design and implementation as email in one hour, click for larger assets/images.)

Results

  • Implemented several A/B tests that increased signup conversion by 3-10%
  • Refactored workflow engine while pairing to enable signup for alternative flows used in A/B testing
Categories
Frontend Full-Stack

RIA for Monitoring

(Yahoo! : 03/09-11/09)

To leverage my skills and experience from developing web apps forĀ monitoring at the enterprise level, I joined a peer team which had been providing the service engineers of Yahoo with a white-box solution paired with Nagios.

In a bid to move away for the costly distributed model of federated service engineering, our team was tasked with providing a centralized enterprise solution. I contributed as a front-end engineer and implemented features in a custom Perl MVC framework.

Results

  • added RIA functionality to an enterprise monitoring-as-a-service replacement for Nagios
  • won a naming competiton for branding the product