When Fluorotherm, a plastics manufacturing company, was looking to streamline its sales process by weeding out small orders, I advocated continuing to service these customers using a cheaper method: e-commerce. Built on top of the Shopify platform, Fluorostore has offered Fluorotherm’s products at competitive prices to hundreds of new and existing customers. It has significantly reduced the burden on the sales team while increasing revenue and customer acquisition.
With version one in white and version two in black below, it's easy to see how far Fluorostore has come. I initially started with the eBay Prostore platform, not knowing much about e-commerce, interface design, themes, or even HTML and CSS. The result was a clunky, if informative shopping platform that resulted in a surprising number of first customers. It gave Fluorotherm enough validation on the idea for me to iterate, which I promptly did by moving to Shopify.
While I gave priority to defining a new theme and layout, it wasn’t until the current version that I improved the picture quality and consolidated many of the product pages into a more organized interface.
A different take on ideation, Noodlecrumbs was a platform I conceived, designed, and built to connect thinkers with builders. It was meant to fit a hole where those with ideas (i.e. an idea for a movie script) don’t have the tools to make them a reality (i.e. film experience, equipment, etc). But by raising funds from others using Noodlecrumbs, the right people could be incentivized to bring those ideas to fruition.
As my first Ruby on Rails web app, Noodlecrumbs forced me to learn and build simultaneously. But that process allowed me to launch it within a month. With the press from TechCrunch, more than one hundred ideas populated the site. After integrating the Stripe payment API, a few ideas even generated funds from other users, as Noodlecrumbs was intended to do.
Along with being my first solo design and programming project, Noodlecrumbs was at times challenging to explain. It thus became the first project for which I wrote a comprehensive FAQ, shown below. It forced me to think through the entire user experience and elaborate on relevant and important topics I felt users would want to know about.
A weekend concept with a friend born from those annoying times waking up in the morning to a frayed toothbrush and empty toothpaste tube, Rainbo would deliver a new, premium electric toothbrush head and a tube of toothpaste every month. After Noodlecrumbs, this was my second project designing the interface from scratch and creating graphics using tools like Webflow and The Noun Project.
Landmarker was a mobile app for discovering landmarked buildings and sites around New York City. Built in just over a month with Adrian Del Balso designing and Jason Lagaac programming, it contained over three hundred landmarks around the city. We not only wrote all the content, but took many of the photos as well. As my first mobile app project, Landmarker’s biggest challenge was figuring out how to organize and display three hundred landmarks’ worth of information.
Below are two ideas we worked on in an effort to clearly organize and display landmark categories. While perhaps a simple concept, these examples show how we were thinking of giving the user options to let us know they were done ‘selecting’ filters. Since we classified landmarks into multiple categories and time periods, it was important to us that the user be able to filter landmarks in this fashion as well. Namely, by toggling multiple categories or time periods.
Patronhood was a crowdfunding platform for urban projects built with Adrian Del Balso and Jason Lagaac. It aimed to inspire citizens to be ”patrons of their neighborhood” and fund projects like parks, statues, or anything else community members wanted. The biggest challenge was creating a brand and platform that achieved the same functionality as other crowdfunding sites while still differentiating from them.
In Patronhood, we looked for new ways to represent the current funding progress, the funding goal, and any “extra features” that could be implemented if a funding goal were to be surpassed. Some of those ideas are shown below.
The point was not to “reinvent the wheel” and come up with a revolutionary way to show “progress”. Rather, by finding a creative way to juxtapose the goal with the current level, we hoped to inspire potential backers to want fund the project to completion, an obviously critical component where most platforms struggled.
A weekend concept with Adrian Del Balso designing, Grapple was a spin-off mobile crowdfunding app from Patronhood. It would allow someone to set up a semi-private campaign like renting a beach house for the weekend or getting tickets to a game, and then crowdfund the cost among his or her friends. Our goal was to create a product that anyone wondering “Would my friends be interested in ‘x’?” could make an actionable decision quickly.
Given our goal of speed and convenience, conveying the logic required to make this product work was the challenge. Executing this strategy resulted in limiting the number of screens the user would need to tap through to set up or respond to a “grapple” campaign. Additionally, as the wireframe below reflects, almost all the screens were designed to not have more than two interactions going in or out.
Codenamed “rain.bo”, this mobile app concept would consolidate all customer support conversations. By feeling and working much like a chat, the entire support history and current conversation would be logged and stored for both the user and support agent to review and communicate. It would eliminate having to recount previous discussions, waiting on busy phone lines, and repeating identification information.
“Laundry Days” can be frustrating. After preparing and trucking clothes down to the laundry room, unavailable machines and empty detergent bottles are the last things anyone wants to find. Perhaps the only thing worse is forgetting about a wash or dry cycle. In an age of “the internet of things”, this weekend wireframing project with Nico Mizono was a stab at creating a smarter way to do and manage laundry, though simply scratching the surface of use cases.
