Itemize, UX & Frontend Engineering
UX & Frontend Engineer · 2015 · 3 min read
Hired as Itemize's first frontend engineer, then handed design too: I owned UX and frontend across the product, rebuilding the web app, improving the internal data-entry and analysis tools, helping build a team payment system, and reworking the marketing site.
Overview
Itemize was my first application-development job out of college. I was hired as the first frontend engineer, and once the team saw I also designed, they brought that work in-house to me as well. Anything involving UX and frontend engineering became my domain.
Problem
Itemize's design and frontend had been outsourced, so the product had no in-house owner for its UX. The web app ran on a painful-to-update .NET UI, the data-entry experience was mouse-heavy and slow, and small changes were hard to ship.
Constraints
- Small early-stage team and limited resources
- An existing .NET UI that was costly to change
- Data-entry throughput directly affected the business
Approach
Working directly with the PM, and with the backend teams where needed, I took on everything UX and frontend. After shipping a 'multi-week' pie chart in a day, I built a new web app that the CEO embraced as the product's direction, added saved filters and team management, and redesigned the data-entry flow to be keyboard-first to cut mouse travel. I also helped build a team payment system, improved the internal data-entry and analysis tools, and rebuilt the marketing site on WordPress with Stripe.
Key Decisions
Build a new web app rather than keep patching the .NET UI Reasoning Alternatives A modern front end was far easier to iterate on and unlocked features the old UI couldn't support.
- Continue incremental fixes to the .NET UI
Redesign data entry around the keyboard Reasoning Alternatives Less time traveling with the mouse means more documents processed, directly improving throughput.
- Keep the mouse-driven workflow
Let the marketing team self-serve through a CMS Reasoning Alternatives Building the marketing site on WordPress with custom shortcodes, and wiring pricing to the Stripe dashboard, let marketing update content and prices without pulling in engineering for every change.
- Hand-code every marketing and pricing change
Tech Stack
- JavaScript
- Web development
- WordPress CMS
- Stripe API
Result & Impact
- First win: Shipped a feature estimated at weeks in a single day
The new web app became the company's product direction and shipped within my first year, and across my time there anything touching UX or frontend, the app, internal tools, payments, and the marketing site, ran through me.
Learnings
- Honest technical opinions build trust faster than agreement
- Optimizing the highest-frequency workflow (data entry) pays outsized dividends
- Tools that let non-engineers help themselves, a CMS, dashboard-driven pricing, keep engineering out of routine updates
Itemize was my first job in application development out of college. I was hired as the first frontend engineer; until then the work had been outsourced to a team in India. During the interview their lead engineer was weighing frontend frameworks and asked what I thought of the up-and-coming Angular; I told him you didn’t need Angular, and he respected the honesty where others would just agree. They also liked the side projects I did, focused on solving problems in style.
When they saw I also did design work, they cancelled the outsourcing contract and handed me both roles. From there, anything involving UX and frontend engineering was mine, down to small touches like a receipt-capturing game on the marketing site for engagement.