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.
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.
Contributors, as they are called, are the +5M people around the world who do work on CrowdFlower’s platform. The application that enables them to do work is one of the company’s heavily trafficked as well as most complicated – blending a Rails backend with MooTools, jQuery, and RequireJS in the frontend.
The application’s UX
…had largely stayed the same for the last five years. In Q1/2014, we decided to enhance it by making it more interactive and towards engaging our users more and conveying the just how much work there is in our system.
Working with the Product Manager and an external Designer, we came up with the following high-resolution mock
Because the application is so heavily used, we knew we couldn’t merely throw the switch on a new design overnight; both from a community management standpoint as well as application performance. Instead, we chose a strategy of introducing a first at the company: use of A/B Testing to determine a design that would perform as well as if not better than the original.
Our key metric for performance in that regard had to do with contributor’s performance after being exposed to the new UX, particular the messaging around our forthcoming gamification and introduction of Levels. In the beginning, we did not have the infrastructure to determine the value for that metric so we simply settled on ‘clicks’ as a (conversion) proxy to understand if the new design was having an impact.
Infrastructure
Without an A/B Testing framework in place, I needed to choose one. As requirements were not concrete for such, I did some due diligence in vetting several options, coming up with a review of A/B testing frameworks for Rails.
It became obvious that Vanity was best suited to our needs. (Since it doesn’t yet have the ability to throttle a percentage of the traffic receiving experiments, I augmented it with Flipper.)
Once that was in place, we could begin iterating on the design, knowing with confidence how we were impacting the user experience.
Server-side
We knew we wanted the experience to be snappy, but completely replacing the existing experience with a Rich Internet Application was far out of the scope for the first month, particularly as there were infrastructure changes to be made to retrofit the stack with A/B Testing. We decided to make progress iteratively over several sprints.
In our first test, we pitted the control (original) against a bare-bones implementation version of the high-resolution mock as the new design.
original
The new version out-performed control (in terms of clicks) 21.3% vs 20.3% (at 95% confidence) so I continued to iterate on the implementation, coming up with the following
To calculate the overall satisfaction by other contributors for a task (denoted by the stars) proved to be too inefficient in this iteration; it wound up losing.
Client-side
On the assumption that we needed to make the experience snappier in order to drive engagement, it was obvious that we would need to have more (and faster) interaction and therefore, an interactive client-side implementation.
As what was essentially a completely parallel product, leveraging only some of the infrastructure that the server-side rendition was utiziling, I begin to flesh out the following
Further refinement (an actual data) was necessary to get it looking more like the high-res mock (and like its server-side-rendered peer)
At this point, we implemented and integrated with our own homemade badging solution, beginning to display badges in the following iteration
The new version out-performed control (in terms of clicks) 21.3% vs 20.3% (at 95% confidence) so I continued to iterate on the implementation, coming up with the following
Testing the impact of particular messaging was also of interest, so we added a Guiders variation as well. At this time we also leveraged Google Analytics Events on the Guider buttons to track how the far the user got in our messaging.
Letting the experiments run a few days with sufficent traffic, we found that client-side-rendered version peformed no worse than the server-side-rendered version (23.9% vs 22.9%) and that having guiders also performed not significantly worse (23.1% vs 23.7%) so we decided to keep both.
By that time, the new version was out-performing control (the original design) 22.2% vs 20.7% (at 99% confidence) so a decision was made to move forward rolling out the new experience to 100% of contributors, doing some polishing (copy/styling) work before finally settling on the following
Results
Used A/B testing to upgrade company’s most highly-trafficked page (5+M views/month,) increasing user engagement by 5% and saving $2K/month (in Bunchball costs) by rolling own simple badging solution.
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.
