Long-running projects I work on for fun.
Side project launched at the end of 2008. Guestlist has processed over $38 million in sales since launch with all growth driven by word-of-mouth from our very happy users.
I constructed and implemented the original design and subsequent iterations. In the past few years I have been responsible for collecting and turning user feedback into new feature designs, collaborating with my partner to design new APIs to support those designs, and building the frontend interfaces to implement it all.
What I have been up to.
The work I performed focused on two major undertakings:
I initiated, designed, and built a design system to unify our suite of five applications. This took the form of:
It brought greater consistency to our software and increased the engineering team's velocity. My relentless focus on creating a small and consistent API was a major part of its success. Reducing the number of things a developer had to learn sped up adoption and buy-in. Providing compositional flexibility reduced the desire to go off-script.
As the only front-end developer on the renter team, I owned the renter experience and completely rebuilt it during my tenure. This included the search experience, checkout flow, and post-booking experience (homepage not included).
Part of that work was optimizing our funnel for greater conversion rates. Great care went into optimizing and testing our checkout flow. Over 2 years my team increased the conversion rate by double digits.
We also had a relentless focus on performance. We tracked and compared our lighthouse scores against AirBnB, RVShare, and others. We beat RVShare on every page, and AirBnb for over 80% of their pages.
I ran a design and development agency that did work for several large clients including the Government of Canada and Trinity Health.
Most of my time was spent being embedded in clients' development teams as an ember.js expert to guide them during architectural decisions, help them overcome technical problems, and ensuring best practices were followed while building the product.
I was brought on to provide a cohesive design vision for the product that up to that point has been assembled ad-hoc.
Duties I was responsible for included visiting customers in the field to gather research data, coordinating with other departments to design a new visual style for the company and product, and redesign the existing product to modernize the interface and simplify the user experience.
As the first employee, I was tasked with creating a brand and designing the UIs while creating a cohesive design language that unified their three distinct products.
I also worked with backend developers to rewrite the front-end for the schematic version control system and implement the new brand and interface designs.
In the early days when JavaScript was JavaScript and IE was relevant I was the designer for a small team tasked with working on the most sensitive and high stakes sections of the application. We completely transformed core features to enhance usability and performance while not alienating existing customers.
Split tests were performed to quantify the improvements. In some cases, time to first action was reduced by a factor of 100.