BRYAN LENCE

WhiskeyMilitia.com is a "One Deal At A Time" site operated by Backcountry.com. Managers of WhiskeyMilitia wanted to completely rework the site and business model, which meant redesigning the information architecture, shopping experience and visual design. As the lead UX designer, I worked on every piece of the project and made sure deliverables came in on time.

WhiskeyMilitia is scheduled to launch in early 2012.

The Backcountry.com shopping community is filled with passionate gearheads that post photos, videos, and answer questions for other shoppers. Their contributions are recorded on the Backcountry.com Leaderboard. I redesigned the Leaderboard to bring more transparency to the community and revamped the underlying game mechanics. This redesign revitalized the Backcountry.com community and caused user-generated content to double.

VISIT SITE

Flake is a mashup that combines Utah road closure data with snow reports along the Wasatch Front. I built Flake to answer two questions: "how much did it snow last night?" and "are the canyon roads open?" The more new snow, the better the skiing. But, too much snow will close the narrow canyon roads that lead up to ski resorts. Flake gives skiers and boarders the information they need to quickly decide where to go so they can spend more time on the slopes.

VISIT SITE

Sesame is a prototype for a web-app that helps people create and edit life-changing instructional diagrams. Organizations such as MIT's D-Lab, the International Development Design Summit, and Afrigadget have created, documented and tried to spread Do-It-Yourself machines that can change people's lives in the developing world. Although these machines are useful, there is no good way for groups to collaboratively create the instructions that show how to build these devices.

Sesame is a place for those finished products to become step-by-step visual instructions that anyone can edit. All diagrams are completely open, drawn in SVG format, and can be edited in the browser or in a desktop application such as Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape.

Sesame was a solo project, built for my thesis at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, and presented to UNICEF on May 11, 2010.

VISIT SITE
(firefox only)

THESIS PRESENTATION

Exploder is a software concept that helps you visualize what is on your computer and how it is organized. Our computers store so much information that it can be hard to know, much less visualize, the complex file structure in which our data is stored. Exploder solves this problem by visually exploding a folder, showing everything contained within. Not only does it show specific folders, but it also gives an overall idea of how a set of folders are organized.

VIEW MOCK

Bestiary is a large, seemingly empty book that displays a new fantastical creature each time someone turns a page. Animal heads, legs, bodies, and other appendages are assembled from a collection of parts, and then given a name reflecting their make-up. For example, a "Mantidilloboon" is an animal assembled from praying mantis, armadillo, and baboon parts. At last count, Bestiary knew how to make just under 5,000 different animals.

I built Bestiary with Caroline Brown.

Bestiary was shown at the ITP 2009 Spring show, and featured on Gizmodo.

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