Tag: HTML

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
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
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
Building buy-in Frontend Growth NUX supply-side

Landing Page Experimenation

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

Following is a representative control version of the landing page

I whiteboarded several concepts gaining buy-in from the chief product stakeholder and then implemented same, using Optimizely to set the parameter to determine which variation a user saw; below you will see the iterations.

Unfortunately, none performed better than control.

Results

  • Tracked performance of inbound traffic from Facebook, Twitter, Google AdWords, and StumbleUpon and designed/implemented various landing pages to improve signup rates.
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
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
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