At the point of connection.
Role: Lead Front End Developer
Inflection spawned from the minds of two brothers, and was conceived in one of their Harvard dorm rooms. They quickly moved it to the West Coast as it began growing rapidly. As the second designer hired, I worked in our downtown Palo Alto office helping to grow the UX team, mentor and learn from other designers, and create a culture of hard work paired with fun.
Inflection's first office space in Palo Alto. 2nd and some of the 3rd floors.
From the beginning, Inflection had been self-funded through its own profits. A great place to be, but the founders had big growth plans for the company and needed to find the right time to show the world they'd arrived. That's where Inflection.com came in.
I was chosen as the lead Front End Developer for the project, and worked directly with the CEO and Brand Director to create a site that was to be visually compelling, serve as a sounding board for the company's public voice, tell our story, and serve investor intrigue.
Inflection.com home page
One interesting challenge the site presented was the heavy employment of 'doodles' as a way to bring a human element to a very technical space - big data. There were so many doodles and drawings on the site, I had to come up with efficient ways of storing, and serving these doodles without affecting performance. I chose to simply use gifs (since we were working with single-tone, transparent images) and a lot of absolute positioning within relatively positioned elements, paired with intelligent loading processes. This allowed for predictive, yet performant display of these images.
Inflection regularly had industry-leading speakers come in to talk and inspire the team. We wanted to share these talks with the world, and thusly created the Speaker Series. This was an archive of the speakers that have come to talk, and a bio on each speaker.
I employed a method that allowed us to host the videos on our servers, and present through an HTML5 video player - or a flash fallback depending on the browser. The Speaker Series quickly grew and helped gain an SEO presence for Inflection.com.
The Speaker Series - Speaker Page. You can imagine the intricacies of developing a page like this from top to bottom.
One of the things that's makes Inflection so successful and special is the people. Our hiring flow aimed to attract applicants who shared our interest in working hard and celebrating our successes. Developing the splash page pre-responsive design was complex, since there was so much imagery and visual precision to respect. I could have basically used images for just about everything, but instead found ways to combine the imagery and text to make it easier on the browsers. You're welcome, browsers.
Another area that used both my development and UX skills was integrating the third party system we were tied to for hiring. I turned a clunky externally served experience into a frictionless flow that fit perfectly into our site's design. It wasn't simple, working with a hodge-podge of someone else's code and UX one layer obscured. I worked directly with our partner when possible, and had to override their styles and JS when it wasn't.
Our 11-for-11 page.
More detail work needed for our Meet the Team page. Lots of data visualization, font-placement, and graphics to play around with.