This is my second decade making web applications. Since moving to San Francisco in 2007, I have worked as an user experience designer and front-end developer for start ups including Zivity, Top Fans, Wikia, and Yammer. I shine where I’m needed to get my hands dirty in many roles: conceptualizing features, designing user experiences, solving tricky problems, writing snappy copy, and engineering user interfaces.
User Experience Design is the process of evaluating all the components of an application to make the whole worth more than the sum of its parts. A truly successful product experience is one that combines visual design, behavior, utility, and content to fulfill the needs of the end user and the business goals of the production team.
Read the full post: User Experience: Design Beyond Aesthetics by Wil Everts
Eeze is a clean slate for professional developers creating custom applications. eeze.min.css comes out of the box at under 6K (BEFORE G-Zipping & you can gain ~2k by swapping to the HTML5 Reset) and sets up a great LESS workflow.
Unlike Twitter Bootstrap, Eeze comes as a minimal starting point for your app. There are no base preset styles to work around, delete, or overwrite. Just clone the app and start writing *your* code in seconds.
Why is it that companies with amazing brick and mortar user experiences still fail at delivering online experiences to match? It's going to seem like I'm picking on a couple companies here, but I'm only picking on them because I love their brick-and-mortar brands so very much.
Read the full post: Online user experience can no longer be an afterthought by Wil Everts
MustWin is the application development consultancy I founded with Mike Ihbe. We’re like the A-Team (with fewer gold chains.) We can produce a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) that isn’t just a throw away application. Have a project that’s moving too slowly? We’re the perfect trump card in your hand! Call us when you don’t know where to begin or when you need some help accelerating results.
Powder Envy was the first project that Mike and I chose to build after founding MustWin. Originally a twitter visualization I made in 2010, the new site uses instagram photos, tweets, and snow data to present a more complete (and fun) picture of the conditions on a mountain. Help spread the stoke by using the #powderenvy hashtag on your snow tweets & instagrams!
Spoke Geek is a casual cycling club I founded in 2012 for SF start-up geeks and friends. I totally love cycling, it never ceases to make me smile! As a start-up geek it’s really easy to become sedentary. So, I thought this would be a fun way to spend time with friends, promote a healthier lifestyle for other web geeks, and raise some money for organizations that make both things possible.
Yammer is the original enterprise social network. During my tenure we overcame Salesforce to own the lion’s share of the social enterprise space with over 4 million users and networks in 85% of the Fortune 500, we expanded our featureset and level of finish in the product with Yammer 3, and tripled in size. Then, in July of 2012, Yammer was acquired by Microsoft for $1.2 Billion.
“Wil’s a talented guy who can deliver for a team and help bring it together, too. He cares intensely about what he delivers. He helped us move from chaos to structure on Yammer’s front end and jumped in on other projects, too.”
- Zack Parker, Director of Web Engineering at Yammer
UI Engineering
In my year and five months at Yammer I fixed countless bugs, worked on dozens of A/B tests to perfect our sign-up process and other features, coded the new header and nav for Yammer 3, helped develop the Yammer API docs site on the side, and helped build the network stats dashboard.
Team Building
Perhaps even more pride inducing is the front-end talent that I interviewed, pitched, and helped bring on to Yammer. At one point I was *the* front-end enginner on their web team, but when I left we had 7 of the most intelligent and fun UI Engineers I have ever worked with!
NodeConf SummerCamp is an unconference for javascript geeks in the hills of Northern California. I quickly ran with the creative freedom this project provided me, whipping out my pen tablet and painting trees, a cave, and a wooden summer camp sign! The end product is a whimsical little one page website to promote the fun weekend retreat.
Wikia empowers more than 75,000 communities like Wookieepedia, WoW Wiki, and Lostpedia. They’re the largest user-generated media company and a top 100 web property. It can be a fun challenge because they're an extremely high-volume site which allows custom CSS/Javascript modifications by each wiki!
“Wil is a smart, creative designer. We worked on a complicated project with a lot of moving parts, and he came up with solutions and new ideas on the fly.”
- Danny Horn, Product Manager at Wikia
Product Design
Wikia wanted a way for users to make customizable achievements for their wikis with a custom graphic. At the same time we needed a way to maintain some level of quality. So, I suggested we make several different frames (bronze, silver, and gold) and layer it over the user uploaded artwork.
Front-End Engineering
I also worked as a front-end engineer at Wikia. I was the interface developer on their hub pages and their popular achievements feature. Here I worked with templating HTML/CSS views from PSD mocks, templating them into the existing application using PHP, and GD for image resizing.
Powder Envy is a project that I had in my back pocket for a long time. One day the idea for the gondola visualization just hit me out of the blue. I sketched it up in my moleskine and emailed it to my pal, Tom. After that things started moving quickly.
Top Fans was fun because it was a chance for us to work on a brand new application and develop it right from the ground up. In no time at all the site was conceptualized, developed, designed, and launched. Over the next few months we made countless improvements and fun-to-develop features.
Zivity was my first Rails development job and my first "mainstream" (Silicon Valley VC funded) start-up. My first day at Zivity Forbes was in the office. A couple days after Zivity was prominent at “the Crunchies,” two months later we were funded. All the while, I got to work with some really great people making some really cool stuff.
“Wil Everts is a pleasure to work with. He’s got a passion for front-end design and and UI. I’ve seen him make some extremely beautiful pages in concert with other developers. It was a pleasure working with him, and I hope to work with him again someday.”
- Alex Choi, Senior Engineer at Zivity
Front-End Engineering
I quickly ramped up rewriting the entire prototype/scriptaculous javascript codebase (including the photo uploader, the photoset viewer, and voting systems) in jQuery. I also did all the front end work on three different complete redesigns of the site.
UX Lead
In 2009 I became Zivity’s UX Lead. I immediately started work on a new home page design intended to overcome longstanding conversion issues, re-architecting the application flow, and fixing bugs. After 6 months of improvements we had doubled our 18 month-old subscriber base!