I am a product designer & developer in NYC.
Design & Development
This is a personal project I’d long wanted to make. Tables for Two is a map app that gathers all of the New Yorker Magazine’s weekly restaurant reviews into one handy place. I’ve always enjoyed their reviews: unexpected picks, open-mindedness, and often a bit of cheeky NYC attitude. But I wanted a map to go along with them so they’d be easier to reference.
The app is simple; open a restaurant and you get a preview of the review, in addition to the restaurant’s Google reviews and the restaurant’s website. Aside from that you can view a chronological list of all recent reviews. I built a simple admin that fetches from Google, and wrote a weekly script that fetches the latest reviews, so I don’t have to remember to do it myself. Happy eating!
Design & Development
Lucia Kempkes is a Berlin-based artist whose work often deals in landscape, but spans a variety of media to explore our relationships to the earth.
She often works in shades of black and white, so we brought in vibrant color to contrast the work. Her work is
also tactile and textured, so we used a bold grid to provide elegant structure. The homepage features each of her recent project cycles, while the individual project pages highlight details of her work and installations. Finally, her about page shows career highlights, and helps to make the work a bit more personal.
Design & Development @ point.me
I’ve been working with point.me, a credit card points travel redemption tool, for the last several years. I work with them in a consultant role, and have been working with them since before they had their own tech or design teams. I was brought on to help bring their rough prototypes into fully-fledged product designs, as well as turn a half-completed Angular app into a state-of-the-art Next.js React app.
We worked around-the-clock to launch their MVP after several quick months, and they’ve gone on to hire full in-house teams that I continue to support. The app lets you search for flights using your own credit card accounts, and then teaches you how to redeem them through opaque means for great value. We’ve built out a robust component library in the design files as well as in Storybook, and continue to improve handoff between teams as well as UX patterns.
Design & Development @ CHANN3L
It was a pleasure to build a platform for CHANN3L, Khalila Douze’s multidisciplinary home for her tarot reading practice, musical artist management, and journalism for various media outlets.
We wanted to make a watery and wavy experience to match the way she fluidly combines these three pursuits, and I explored the practice of paper marbling to create an environment to match.
Design & Development @ Noname Book Club
Noname Book Club is an online & IRL community dedicated to uplifting voices of people of color. They select two monthly books to read and discuss together. They also send books to incarcerated folks across the country, and put out a quarterly newsletter highlighting marginalized voices in support of abolition, reparations, food sovereignty, and other topics of resistance.
The website’s goal is to highlight the most important resources they offer: learning about each book selection, finding local black- and POC-owned bookstores, finding libraries that carry the books, and finding local chapters to join. We chose an aesthetic that references radical literature and educational resources, and built it nimbly in order to launch for their one-year anniversary.
Design & Development @ Locally Grown
Locally Grown is a streaming platform that gives under-represented videos and voices throughout history & culture a place to shine (think: public access television). Locally Grown is the long-dreamed vision of Jamil Baldwin and Tyler Bernard, two LA-based artists. They tapped into their rich community of creators and curators, while I built a platform for them to grow into.
In building the site, we wanted an experience that let the programming shine and a big requirement there was
to prevent users from controlling which videos they play—no pause, no next, no skip. It’s fundamentally a lean-back experience, which offered enjoyable technical challenges, especially on mobile. And like TV, the site is built of only a few core components: each channel, a TV Guide, and a list of channels.
Locally Grown is an ever-morphing experiment, a resource for rare materials, and hopefully something that lasts in a new era of streaming. Enjoy!
Head of Product @ Aidin
For over two years I worked with Aidin, an NYC-based healthcare company, to redesign and bring product thinking to their app. Aidin helps ease patient care transitions (say, moving from a hospital to a nursing home) by bringing quality data to the moment when patients choose where they want to receive their care.
Together we rebuilt Aidin from the ground up, rethinking how referrals are sent, received, and managed, as well as exploring their future-forward business goals.
Aidin’s users are hospital case managers and provider intake coordinators that use Aidin all-day, every day, so it was important to do extensive user testing, interviewing, demoing, and beta testing of our proposed solutions.
After setting the vision, we moved into rebuilding the app. I managed our roadmap, as well as our engineering team, providing project management, code review, and QA testing, while managing the full Aidin team’s evolving requirements and needs with agile development.
Head of Design @ Genius
I worked at Genius, a crowdsourced lyrics site, annotation platform, and all-around music + tech company, from 2014 – 2017. While there I led our design team, both from the product & branding sides. Over the course of a few years we rebranded from "Rap Genius" to "Genius", built a revolutionary web annotation platform, redesigned all of the core pieces of our site (including
song/lyric pages, artist & user pages, homepage, and articles — on web and apps) as well as built out our marketing design department from the ground up. I worked across the team & company to make sure everyone was satisfied and happy, and continually pushed us forward to stay up with the best design & user interface standards.
Freelancer @ Me
Before Genius I freelanced, working on my own projects and with various companies in the U.S. and Europe. One of my favorites was a personal site, Table Manners,
which brought a 30-year-old text on etiquette and dining to the internet, complete with self-quiz.
Developer @ Refinery29
After moving to New York I began interning at Refinery29, the leading fashion & lifestyle platform for women, as a graphic design intern. From there I took an unexpected leap to being the first member of their newfound tech team under their first CTO. I started knowing a bit of HTML and slowly (it felt very fast) built off that knowledge to become a full-stack PHP developer, moving the site from years-old MovableType code to a custom framework. We built every page on the site from
scratch, as well as new features like a street style hub, event guides, live festival trackers, video landing pages, and robust email- and partnerships-building internal tools. The team, tech and company-wide, grew quickly, and I happily became a person people could ask questions about all layers of the stack. I still have friends that work there today; they say they know of me from my github username, which they still see sprinkled throughout the code. 😱
I am currently freelancing.
Contact me at jenn@jennscheer.com.