Tag: CoffeeScript

Categories
demand-side eCommerce Frontend Innovation OOJS Process Prototyping

Better NUX

(Bluxome Labs : 6/16-6/16)

Towards improving the New User Experience, Design came up with the idea to use Callouts around page elements whose affordance wasn’t intuitive.

Given the mockup, I set about implementing it pixel-perfectly.

For the first pass, I simply crafted the markup based on Bootstrap’s Alert and hid it by default, revealing it with JS if logic was met.

Then, realizing that the Bootstrap Alert wasn’t sufficient for Design’s needs and that the Bootstrap Popover was, as well as that there would be opportunity to re-use the code elsewhere in the platform, I created a JS Class for the NUX (a.k.a. “Callout”) and subclassed (example) accordingly, modifying the markup accordingly.

Results

  • Established team habit around refactoring and improving OOJS.
Categories
Architecture Backend demand-side eCommerce Frontend Full-Stack Innovation SPAs

Demand-side UX Refresh

(Bluxome Labs : 4/16-4/16)

In a unique position given my previous experience with the UX, I took an opportunity when tasked by Product and Design to not only reskin the Listing but also to upgrade it.

Given that no one besides me really knew how RequireJS was working in the application and given its falling-out-of-favor in the general community as a module-loading solution, it was time to upgrade it to Webpack.

Here’s what the Task Listing looked like before

Here’s the mock from Design

In chronological order, here’s what I did

  1. Upgraded DataTables from 1.9 to 1.10
  2. Refactored JavaScript towards more of an OO paradigm
  3. Applied new skin
  4. Ported JavaScript for RequireJS to CoffeeScript for Webpack
  5. Deployed

…and here’s what I delievered

with modal

Results

  • Successfully advocated for adoption of Webpack to replace RequireJS and then ported most-trafficked page, while achieveing near-pixel-perfect re-skinning.

 

Categories
Collaboration Frontend Full-Stack Innovation Machine Learning SPAs supply-side

ML Workflow UX

(Bluxome Labs : 3/16-3/16)

After focusing on other priorities, I was pulled into a revision of an interface (I had also created) as delievered for the Rich Data Summit allowing customers to send any model predictions under a certain threshold to the crowd.

I took the following (revised UX) static mock from Design

and iterated to deliver the following

Results

  • Crafted SPA as lynchpin connecting platform’s Machine Learning (Python) and human-in-the-loop (Ruby) systems after convincing team SPA was optimal approach.
Categories
Frontend Innovation Prototyping supply-side

Data ETL UI

(Bluxome Labs : 2/16-2/16)

Given only the following mockup from Design (created using InVision)

I did research until I found this.

I knew there would be a fair deal of work to do to re-purpose the idea to realize what Design had proposed so I started out small in my iterations.

First, I tried to standup the simplest POC using jQuery Draggable that I could in a single, local page.

Then, I added Bootstrap (the styling paradigm of the eventual target codebase) and continued to refine interactions

To get Product and Design’s feedback, I deployed the protoype on Heroku.

I was getting close to integration and that would eventually prove the most challenging (given pre-existing styling interactions and positioning.)

I incorporated my work into the main codebase and iterated on styling and interaction from there. Also, I created a CoffeeScript spec for covering the main features.

Here’s the final product

Results

  • Re-purposed an existing drag/drop example using jQuery Draggable in order to facilitate data management.
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.