StackSocial

Responsive Redesign

StackSocial first came to us for their first major redesign. They wanted the site to work well across all devices, so making the site responsive was a top priority. In addition, they provided key performance indicators for the new design that were easy to measure: decrease bounce rate, increase time on the site, and increase revenue.

Jordan Keating, UI Designer at Philosophie, worked closely with Stack’s founder, Josh Payne, to bring his vision of the site to life. We presented designs in both mobile, tablet and desktop breakpoints. The new design added more visual interest through the use of textures, and extended the brand concept by introducing “stacks” as a visual element. The “stacks” also served to convey the bundled software packages that StackSocial is known for. The layout was also modified to promote shareability.

Codebase Refactoring

StackSocial was a hit, and as the company scaled its operations, it needed to leverage technology more and more in order to stay efficient. After the successful redesign, StackSocial came back to Philosophie to help them add features to its administrative system, through which they ran all aspects of the business. However, after a year of building features onto a homegrown system, the legacy codebase was beginning to slow down feature development.

Nick Giancola, a Partner at Philosophie, led the effort to carefully balance codebase refactoring while developing new features that the company urgently needed. The refactoring allowed the engineering team to move faster, and also optimized certain aspects of the code to improve scalability. The accounting system that Nick built from the ground up was able to handle thousands of partner accounts and millions of transactions over a quarter-million user accounts. In fact, it was even featured in Subledger's blog.

Accounting Dashboard

As a sales-driven business, the management and sales teams at StackSocial needed a dashboard to analyze real-time data from their system. Nick worked with Stack’s growing development team while a Philosophie UX designer worked with the business team to determine which statistics should be calculated from the data.

Here are some examples of the data we exposed:

All of these visualizations let StackSocial customize marketing and sales engagements based on their biggest revenue drivers. Before the dashboard, Stack’s sales team had to manually extract and analyze this data with Excel, a process that took hours. The dash was built to enable new statistics to be exposed with very little effort.

Recruiting an internal dev team

Meanwhile, we also worked with Josh to recruit and expand their internal tech team. We helped set up a recruiting process for StackSocial and Nick led technical reviews of the candidates. As we hired new developers, we trained them quickly through pair programming and then set them up with the systems they needed to better prioritize and deliver features. We hired three developers and set Stack up for future hiring success.

Content Management

StackSocial’s business data is complicated: an advanced referral system, multi-tenant platform, flexible payout schedules, and wide range of product types resulted in a mind-boggling array of business rules and processes. Philosophie simplified the complex. Our team designed and built a custom administrative backend which exposes over 50 database tables via a few consistent and easy to use interfaces.

Admin UX

Almost a year later, StackSocial brought us back to envision an even more delightful admin experience. This was an exciting time — we witnessed StackSocial’s growth from a handful of hardworking employees to a serious business. Our UX Strategist on the project, Joy Liu, sums the project up best: “Because of the evolution of the company and expansion of the team, the admin dashboard could no longer accommodate the most recent business strategy. There was a lot of technical and design debt left behind by the forerunners. I was brought into the project to help realign the admin experience with the current and upcoming strategy, as well as create a new platform for each team to perform their job with ease.”

To start the project, Joy spent two weeks interviewing each StackSocial team member. Here are some user insights: