Adopting Agile methodologies and nomencalture, our team chose to make sprint commitments in points (using Fibonacci numbers.)
Seeing an opportunity to use discipline towards making our performance go up-and-to-the-right, I began tracking some key metrics in a spreadsheet, some of which are displayed below
Figuring that the data would resonately at a gut level if visualized, I charted it as well
Results
Took on Scrum Master role (in addition to IC and Tech Lead responsibilities) and used a data-driven paradigm to achieve a 69% trailing-3-sprint-average improvement.
In late August 2015, given previous successes in the year, I was tapped to lead the engineering team for delvering a visual identiy refresh (in conjunction with conference-ready AI deliverable) by early October.
Week 1
took Bootstrap 3/Flat UI/custom styling from Designer and created a static page as ‘gold standard’ for other engineers to reference
identified priority routes on which the new design would need to be rolled out
reference page
Week 2
created a new layout for and and began rolling out new design on the Rails app
drafted a plan for updating the Merb app seamlessly
began to onboard other engineers
Weeks 3-5
prototyped and tested the idea for asset precompiling in the Rails app and replacing the base assets of the Merb app
continued polishing
guided other engineers on implementation
continued polishing
Week 6
coordinated bug-free deploy in conjunction with Marketing (who was working for similarly refreshing the third-party-hosted home page)
Results
Organized work of four engineers (two local incl. CTO, two remote) as Tech Lead while planning (and tracking against) engineering sprints and deliverables over two months.
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.
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.
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.
After two years of usage, the company could tell that the paradigm previously introduced had led to improved Usability overall of the product but users were still confused about workflow.
After having tackled the welcome, we launched into rolling out a complete overhaul of the UX, moving from a left nav Master-Detail paradgigm to a top-nav Subway-Map approach.
The main challenge with rolling out a new UX was that it had to happen for both a Rails and a Merb application. Neither uses the same paradigm when it comes to layout so the approach had to be adapted to each and yet made general enough to not incur (even more than was already present) tech debt.
I served as Tech Lead and architected a solution, led other junior engineers in implementation, and managed interactions and expectation with Product and Design.
Following is a general impression of where we began and where we wound up
Results
Led engineering efforts around a complete UX overhaul of the company’s most important customer interaction.
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.
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.
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.
