YouTube Live
YouTube Live was my main project during my Summer 2010 internship at YouTube. My time on the project was split between User Experience Design and Web Development. This allowed me to work in-depth with both teams to design and develop YouTube's live streaming product.
Most of my work focused on the broadcaster experience of YouTube Live. I created mocks for the stats module, flows for advanced braodcasting options (specifically Tricaster integration), and advertising options.
My HTML and JavaScript work was focused on the live comments module, broadcast information editor, and various interface components.
I also led designs and set vision for yet to be released aspects of YouTube Live.
Legit Lyrics
Legit Lyrics addresses the problem of slow and ad infested song lyric websites. Legit Lyrics clearly presents song lyrics with minimal visual distractions and without ads. Instead, Legit Lyrics makes money through a single referral link to the Amazon MP3 store localted at the bottom of each song.
Page speed and search engine ranking are optimized to ensure maximum responsiveness and song findability. The site and lyrics are designed to help users find lyrics as quickly as possible. For instance, each chorus is slightly indented to help people visual parse a song.
Legit Lyrics is still in development and new features and optimizations are in the works. Especially significant forthcoming features include a mobile friendly version of Legit Lyrics as well as site wide search functionality.
Legit Lyrics is powered by Getterdone, a fast and simple MVC for PHP by Matt Ward. MySQL stores all 400,000+ songs and their lyrics.
Jean
Jean is a touch screen kiosk powered by CSS3, HTML5, and Ruby on Rails. It was created for my Software Design & Documentation class in Spring 2010 with the help of Michael Gram, Kyle Mackenzie, and Dan Weeks.
I was responsible for Jean's visual and interaction design as well as building the interface in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Apart from the digital flyers, the interface contains no images and is rendered exclusively with CSS.
Jean is intended to be used as an information touch screen kiosk for use outside of a conference room in a school or office. Each kiosk displays the daily schedule for the room it's stationed outside. Additionally, it allows users to see the weekly and monthly calendars for a room and search for events occuring in differnt rooms.
The search functionality uses a custom JavaScript touch keyboard which I developed for the project in lieu of a suitable pre-existing touch keyboard.
Pulse of the Planet
Pulse of the Planet is a Google App Engine powered app displaying the latest tweets in real time in North America that mention snow. I built it as a way to visualize in tweets about the northeast blizzard of 2010 in real time.
Tweets which mention snowboarding or skiing are denoted with special icons. Additionally, selected tweets are displayed in the right column, and tweets on the bottom are occasionally brought to focus. The logo and map pulse each time a new tweet is broadcast.
Pulse of the Planet makes use of the Google Maps API, Google Reverse Geocoding Service, Twitter Search API, Google App Engine, and Typekit for custom web fonts.
Expand
Expand is a Google Chrome extension which expands a short link (like those from bit.ly) and shows the final destination of theat link. This allows people know where a link will take them without actually having to click on it, potentially saving them a visit to a site infested with malware.
The extension is written entirely in JavaScript and is powered by a custom Google App Engine backend I built. The backend is used to determine the final location of the link to protect the user's security and privacy. Additionally, Expand is optimized for performance in order to inform users as soon as possible of the final destination of the short link. Expand is also minimally intrusive to ensure that it does not impede or interfere with the user's browsing experience.
You can download Expand from the Google Chrome Extensions Gallery.
BaseLodge
BaseLodge is a ski shop management web app I developed for the RPI Ski & Snowboard Club in 2008 to handle member registration, trip sign ups, and equipement rentals. Previously, the club relied on multiple spreadsheets and paper notes to manage its memberships and records.
BaseLodge allows the club offericers to maintain consistent digital records of each member, the equipment they rent, and the trips they sign up for. BaseLodge has been instrumental in reducing overhead associated with daily operations by streamlining common tasks.
One key to BaseLodge's effectiveness is its intuitive interface. With features like typeahead search, barcode scanner integration, and list emailing, BaseLodge aims to be powerfully effective and frustration free.
A public version of BaseLodge which will allow any ski club or shop to use BaseLodge is currently in the development.
TIME.com
During the Summers of 2007 and 2008, I was a temporary front end developer at Time Inc. TIME.com was among the many projects I worked on during those two summers in New York City. My work on TIME.com consisted of helping implement the redesign and creating the mail widget on the main page. Additionaly, I created a Google Maps powered widget which tracked movements of candidates during the 2008 US Presidential Elections.
Other sites I worked on while with Time Inc. included Health.com, Southern Living, Golf.com, People, and Real Simple. While at Time Inc. in summer 2008, I worked closely with the Ruby on Rails team during the redesign of Real Simple.
I also gave several presentations to the front end team about web standards and emerging web trends. I continue to return a few times each year to present to the front end team at Time.