I am a rubber band ball: an amalgamation of pixelated creativity, empathy, and precision.
Bouncing between design, engineering, and product management, my potential energy has grown fiercely over the past nineteen years as I've added layer upon layer of skills, technique and experience.
For as long as I can recall, I've been fascinated by languages: spoken, written, and illustrated. Inspired by a realm of opportunity after learning Spanish, I found that I had a similar knack for code.
My most joyful moments are when someone's life is better through a product I've shaped and breathed life into.
Given immense opportunities by global brands, empowered by startup culture, tested by freelancing through a recession ... I've helped bring world-class applications to fruition.
... and the best is yet to come.
college
University of Puget Sound — Tacoma, WA
Phi Beta Kappa — Class of 2002
Honors in Studio Art
high school
Eastmont High School — East Wenatchee, WA
Valedictorian — Class of 1998
Chief Pixelsmith | Principal
September 2004 - Present
- Consulted for dozens of companies across a smattering of multidisciplinary tasks: site redesigns, development, interactive infographics, Wordpress implementations, marketing, email campaigns, identity, etc.
- Clients include: NBBJ, Microsoft Bing, Starbucks, Killer Infographics, Caffé Vita, Reef Light Interactive, One4All.org, Lustre, National Council of La Raza, Urban Harvest, Tire Buyer, Number Sleuth, MovingWorlds.org and many others.
- Launched Magnifying the Universe (an interactive, immersive dive into the scale of hundreds of known objects) in April, 2012. It was featured in National Geographic and hundreds of other scientific blogs. Traffic has peaked numerous times around 100k sessions per day and continues to sustain over 3,000 impressions daily.
Director, Product Development
January 2016 - April 2019
- Managed the user experience for Arivale's member app and web dashboard experiences to distill coaches' recommendations, action plans, and complex data sets of genetics, blood, Fitbit/Garmin/Apple Watch, microbiome, saliva, and more.
- Boosted engagement and retention rates much higher than industry standards and drove positive health outcomes for thousands of members, as shown in our most recent Nature publication.
- Regularly worked with the Executive, Clinical, Coaching, and Research teams to create new data insights that were not only scientifically accurate, but understandable and actionable for members. Examples: Weight Genetics, Sleep Genetics, Exercise Genetics, Active Minutes vs Resting Heart Rate, TMAO Score, and many more.
- Qualitatively and quantitatively tested concepts with cohorts of beta users and individuals unfamiliar with our product to ensure usability.
- Grew my team from four to nine incredible front-end/mobile/back-end engineers and designers.
Sr Interactive Engineer
April 2013 - December 2015
- Designed and developed HTML based clients for iPhone, iPad, and web as well as a native Apple Watch prototype.
- Wrote a highly extensible model and data driven Node.js rendering engine on AWS which supported various front ends for systems of record including Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Blackbaud, and SAP as well as an IoT client for Nortek.
- Implemented analytics to articulate app usage, reinforcing positive trends and preventing recurring pit-falls.
- Optimized the signup flow, boosting overall app signup by 10x.
Chief Experience Officer
August 2011 - May 2013
- Created dashboards for businesses to quickly segment and market to micro-demographics of their customer base.
- Leveraged Facebook's APIs to collect customer data.
- Wrote algorithms to categorize, sort and filter users based on geography, age, likes, loyalty, etc.
- Integrated the platform with Mailchimp, Constant Contact and Facebook for one-click micro-marketing blasts.
Web Design Manager
January 2011 - January 2012
- Designed and developed complex multi-site wide A/B tests in SiteSpect via Photoshop and RegEx.
- Redesigned core functionality of All Star's suite of sites, ultimately lifting conversion rates in each of the business's verticals.
- Wrote an internal stock photography application to tag and categorize thousands of purchased images saving hundreds of dollars in duplicate purchases as well as wasted time finding the right image.
- Continued managing a creative team.
Lead Web Designer/Developer
July 2010 - January 2011
- Managed a creative team.
- Prioritized the company's brand and design goals.
- Worked directly with Dev to integrate larger projects.
- Ran countless ad-hoc projects "under the radar" via Photoshop, Illustrator, PHP, HTML, CSS, JS, Flash (AS3), MySQL and other web standards to rapidly prototype and test ideas in the wild.
Web Designer/Developer
August 2009 - July 2010
- Designed and coded landing pages, email campaigns and microsites.
- Boosted SEO and paid conversion rates for prospective students looking to go back to school.
Software Engineer
June 2008 - August 2009
- Created the first-of-its-kind cross device application platform built on J2ME and HTML.
- Designed and developed responsive pages before the term was coined, which seamlessly worked across Motorola, Blackberry, Nokia and dozens of other devices, regardless of minuscule screen sizes at the time.
- Launched Hallmark's mobile card app, where users could send virtual cards to each other from their phone.
Sr. Interactive Developer
August 2004 - June 2008
Worked on designing, developing, implementing and supporting:
- Two versions of in-store cd-burning kiosks used in over 700 stores across the country.
- Promotion of in store CDs pushing Starbucks to the #1 physical distributor of music in the US.
- HearMusic.com, which was the first major corporate site to leverage deep linking and a back button support for a fully Flash based site.
- Now Playing displays in Seattle, San Francisco, and New York, saving baristas thousands of unnecessary trips to the back to discover what song was playing overhead.
- Numerous executive level demos and presentations for Howard Schultz and Jim Donald.
Web Developer II
August 2003 - August 2004
- Designed and developed revolutionary FAA compliant training software for Airport Services.
- Mitigated the need to physically base all network training in Seattle.
- Saved the company millions of dollars annually by migrating the education to the cloud.
These are some of my favorite design projects I've worked on over the past 19 years that I can share. There are many others that remain bound by NDAs, but for the most part, this will give you a decent snapshot of my skill set as a designer.
These are some of my favorite development projects I've worked on over the past 19 years that I can share. There are many others that remain bound by NDAs, but for the most part, this will give you a decent snapshot of my skill set as an engineer.
I'd love to hear about your project; feel free to say hello.
- Hit me up by email: bill [at] billtinney [dot] com
- Or via LinkedIn