Inkubook began life as a collaborative authoring community for a publishing company. I began my UX career as the designer and first employee of this initiative, which pivoted to a photobook startup within a year.

Problem

By early 2008 our team had laid the groundwork for a collaborative authoring community when we were informed by our leadership that we would transition to a functioning beta photobook application in two months. Our team was a 100% Microsoft shop, building out our product for release using the still-beta Silverlight plugin. Project management was Scrum, an Agile framework using kanban-style tasks.
Prior to release, the marketing team served as de-facto product managers and required a high degree of involvement in the design process, resulting in final approval of documentation, including production-fidelity comps.

Actions

I provided wireframes, photoshop comps, and front-end development support to this process.

• Interaction Design consisted primarily of wireframes composed via InDesign and use cases and flowcharts designed in Visio. The detailed wireframes were especially valued by the development team, including one experienced team member who said he was sold on accepting the job after having seen the quality of the wireframes.
• Visual Design for the Silverlight application was created in MS Expression Design, a new program that created vector graphics with the intention of directly placing them into the finished product. Photoshop was used for approval of high-fidelity comps.
• Front-End Development was achieved using HTML/CSS, Flash and XAML (using Expression Blend).

Results

The photobook editing interface for Inkubook was used by thousands of users for over four years. The interface was retained for some time even after the company was sold in 2012.

Jake is a great designer, with a passion for sweating the details and an eagerness to learn and adapt. Most importantly, Jake has a sincere concern for the needs of the customer, which shows through in his work.

– Chris Huffman, UX Designer at Inkubook, March 2008
And still as nice a thing as anyone has said about working with me.