Categories
eCommerce Frontend Innovation supply-side

Supply-side Refresh

(CrowdFlower : 7/13-12/13)

This was an enormous effort to overhaul a product whose UX had not been altered much in five years.

We took a piece-by-piece approach to swapping out components because of the complexity of the legacy behemoth. First, we refreshed the views in the legacy app, which involved changing styling in three different places (because the app had grown “organically” over the years, taking on three different styling paradigms styling was defined in custom stylesheets, in Less, and inline.)

In parallel, part of the team started building out the new peer Rails 3 app, the eventual destination for all views, complete with the company’s brand-new proprietary SSO solution (also built in parallel.) Finally, routing was updated to send all traffic to the Rails app.

Forming

Between August and September of 2013, we coalesced as a team under the project champion, the company’s CTO, and began formulating what the new UX should be and do.

Below is a screenshot of an example of the dashboard as seen by the end user (Merb, built in 2008)

Below is a screenshot of the progress of a microtask job, also as seen by the user (sensitive information redacted)

Norming

Between September and October of 2013, we cranked out the new experience.

Based on a design concept by the other F2E in the team, we began restyling low-risk interfaces of the system. The new design was not simply a reskin, but involved introducing a similar-yet-improved information architecture, an example of which can be seen below

Following are a few more example screenshots demonstrating the evolving look-and-feel

Configuration Panel

As we were tackling the UX, a backend engineer in a peer team was working in parallel to create a custom role-based SSO system that we would leverage for enforcing authentication and authorization in a new way for the company.

Shortly before the conference, a decision was made to go with a second design concept, not entirely different from the original, but a little more polished. A designer was requisitioned to provide the new design. From that point forward to product launch, we mostly fine-tuned the details.

The following screenshot demonstrates not only the new design but also the use of the new SSO solution, which can be seen where certain UI elements are disabled based on the user’s permissions

To QA the new experience, we ran it in alpha against production data repositories just prior to the conference.

Performing

After the launch, we maintained the product, adding features we had not been able to squeeze in.

Below is an example screenshot of how the final product shaped up

Results

  • Consolidated multiple styling paradigms for new UX ahead of company-sponsored conference.
Categories
Frontend oss

OSS & Ember & Tooling

CrowdFlower : 8/12-10/13)

In August of 2012, given expertise with Ember at the time, I was tapped by the Yeoman team to head the project. I contributed by adding features and documentation as well as ensuring Pull Requests being to Yeoman quality standards.

Results

  • Developed and maintained the original scaffolding solution for Ember apps.
Categories
CMS demand-side Frontend SPAs

Demand-side Internal Tooling

(CrowdFlower : 7/13-8/13)

The CrowdFlower platform is consumed via a number of microtasking sites. Each site registers and maintains its own users, but to better track unique identities across the CrowdFlower platform, we built a Single Page App in Ember.js to allow associating users across partner microtasking sites with one unique identifier in the CrowdFlower platform.

Results

  • Implemented a CRUD tool for managing users using Ember.js while iterating in conjunction with Product Manager as requirements changed.
Categories
Architecture demand-side Frontend Innovation SPAs TDD

Improving QA with SPA

CrowdFlower : 4/13-7/13)

Test Questions are used as the gold standard of quality in the CF platform, but they can be laborious to create, particularly for work that’s periodically repeated.

As no templatized solution existed, a team of three of us (me as F2E, Product Manager, and Backend Engineer) tackled creation of an internal product to simplify the workflow.

The user flow was to create “Cases” of Test Questions that got sent to jobs as “Batches”; where the composite idea of a “Mold” encompassed all “Cases” and “Batches” for a particular set of target jobs.

(“The Forge” was the product’s original name, derived from a time when “Test Questions” were known as “Gold.”)

One of the more challenging aspects of the project was the testing of the app. Selenium has always been a robust solution for testing even JS-heavy experiences, but given its heft, Poltergeist was used instead.

The product was to eventually be made available externally but never was.

Results

  • Built internal workflow tool using Ember.js.
Categories
demand-side eCommerce Frontend

Owned Demand-side UX

(CrowdFlower : 1/13-3/13)

The app is CrowdFlower’s most highly-trafficked app. It also happens to be one of the company’s most technically complex, given its history.

Its architecture is that of a Rails app, wrapping a Gem that extracted business logic from the company’s legacy (original) Merb app. The Gem contains all logic around rendering, styling, and providing interactivity for CML, the basis of abstracting microtasks in the platform.

The app was built (before my time) in order to bring a richer, more interactive experience to those doing microtasking work. When the original architect departed only weeks after I joined the company, maintenance and feature implementation fell to me.

Results

  • Supported site’s most highly-trafficked, revenue-generating UI (allowing for custom JS and CSS.)
Categories
demand-side eCommerce Frontend Full-Stack Innovation Prototyping

Big Data ETL

(Bluxome Labs : 8/12-9/12)

Results

  • Got up-to-speed on the basics of Hadoop and prototyped v1 of Driven UI.
Categories
Affiliate Backend eCommerce Frontend Full-Stack Growth supply-side

Selling More

(Shop It To Me : 6/10-7/12)

Results

  • Iterating with Product to scope, implement (Rails w/MySQL,) and A/B-test pixel-perfect sign-up/refer-a-friend/search/browse/opt-out/profile experiences
  • Drove conversions in the form of signups, virality, and clicks for not only our flagship web and email products (used by 4M+ users) but also eight new product launches
  • Architected company’s newest Ember.js-based product
  • Quickly integrated into a small, fast-moving, startup engineering team
  • Became proficient in all things Rails
  • Ensuring quality through the use of code reviews, TDD, unit, functional, integration, and regression tests under continuous integration, testing plans, and mentoring/pairing to deliver functionality, fix bugs, refactor legacy code, and transfer knowledge
  • Have assumed lead (primarily frontend) responsibilities while reporting directly to CTO
  • Established F2E guidelines and best practices
  • Architected the company’s newest product, an Ember.js-based Single Page Application
  • Leveraged Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest APIs to increase our social reach (including the use of Facebook Connect and the Like Button during signup and tell-a-friend experiences)
  • Prototyped iPhone app for user to navigate item stream during in-house Hackathon
  • Contributed improvements to our Nokogiri-based data-harvesting framework.
Categories
crm eCommerce Emails Frontend NUX supply-side

Improving Virality

(Shop It To Me : 2/10-5/12)

Taken in comparison with the default look and feel of our quintessential ‘tell-a-friend’ experience…

… the following examples depict some of the numerous ways we have experimented with (testimonials, site activity feeds, markup positioning, copy, timer, interstitials, refreshed creatives, etc.) to encourage users to spread the word.

These represent just a handful of the variations I’ve implemented.

Results

  • Realized a bump of 10-15% in the number of friends told (depending on the variation)
Categories
Affiliate Emails

Email Newsletters

(Shop It To Me : 2/10-5/12)

Below are a few of examples of the types of one-off marketing materials we sent to our users. They tend to fall into several categories: tell-a-friend promotions, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, special sales/announcements, and new product announcements.

All newsletters are designed and created in-house.

Results

  • Created numerous hand-crafted, one-off HTML newsletters
  • Reduced the time it takes to create a newsletter from two days to two hours
  • Normalized a set of legacy tables to reduce the possibility of error when assigning subject-line and other trials

 

Categories
Architecture Collaboration eCommerce Frontend Innovation Prototyping SPAs supply-side

A New Way To Shop

(Shop It To Me : 1/12-4/12)

Shop It To Me has been a beloved service for years when it comes to finding the best deals across retailers, but we wanted to enable the user finer-grained abilities to find exactly the item(s) of interest for them.

We often had feedback about being able to drilldown by clothing type and brand (e.g. “Rebecca Minkoff handbags”) but our previous tools didn’t enable that kind of granularity.

Enter “Threads.”

As the brainchild of our CEO, project “Threads” has become a way for users to track the specific items of interest to them. We now empower the user with the ability to get as general (e.g. “Black dresses”) or as specific as they want. (e.g. “Rebecca Minkoff handbags under $300.”)

Below, you’ll see the hi-res) mockup we came up with (after having previously white-boarded the idea) in early March (click to view.)

inspiration (as mocked-up in Photoshop)

Over the following two weeks, I ramped up on Ember.js and implemented the first version of the app while the other engineer built out the pseudo-RESTful backend. I won’t claim that the code we produced was the cleanest either one of us ever wrote; while doing the best we could, getting to market was the true driving motivator.

We went live – that is, deployed to production for internal and a select group of test users – on March 27th, 2012, with the following (click to view)

very first landing page

Based on user tester feedback, we decided to bolt-on onboarding and improve the look, so four days later on March 31st, 2012, we deployed the following (click to view)

revised landing page with header and pseudo-onboarding

Based on observations during user testing, we realized the opportunity to incorporate a feed of site-wide activity as that would benefit discovery. We also took a few cycles to flesh out onboarding and a “Things To Do” list given challenges users’ had in making sense of the new product. We also tweaked styling to highlight the very newest items in the users’ results; screenshots follow (click to view.)

onboarding modal on landing page (4/11/2012)
 
1st try: TTD/activity feed on landing page (4/11/2012)
 
2nd try: TTD/activity feed on landing page (4/12/2012)
emphasizing new items (released 4/12/2012)

We brought in more and more user testers. Here’s a screenshot from April 17th, 2012, showing progress we made from our observations

4/17/2012 release of results page

While observing user testers, we discovered that they wanted tastemakers to help them navigate the overwhelming number of apparel items, so we introduced the concept of curation. We also made the assets/images larger by popular demand.

curation (4/23/2012)
results page (4/23/2012)
results page w/larger assets/images (next day : 4/24/2012)

After April 24th, we stepped back to assess how we were doing. I was rotated onto our bread-and-butter projects but the team was augmented with other talent and continued forward, contracting the look-and-feel out to a third party.

The product has since been retired.

Results

  • To revolutionize personalized shopping, a team of three (the CEO as product manager, me as the F2E/architect, another as backend engineer,) created a new shopping experience using Ember.js over two sprints
  • Ramped up quickly on Ember.js
  • Architected frontend as a Single Page Application
  • Worked with backend engineer to agree upon/implement integration between FE and BE
  • Drove development through four major iterations during a two one-month sprints
  • Suggested (though not responsible for implementing) lazy-load as a way to improve performance
  • Picked up design slack when we lost our Graphic Designer
  • Scoped frontend deliverables and managed expectations
  • Worked with CTO to coordinate out-of-cycle releases to production
  • Planned, conducted, and analyzed user testing