The studio closed; individual client acceptance and handoff receipts still require review.
Situation
A digital product and design studio co-founded in Spokane in 2014, serving startups and larger organizations, both directly and through agency partners.
Commitment
Turn client needs into web products and experiences while owning the proposal, scope, and daily delivery process.
Constraint
Research, responsive behavior, accessibility, browser compatibility, and maintainability had to survive the move from design to implementation.
Zach’s ownership
Co-Founder & Creative Developer. The authored studio account describes leading design and engineering, consulting, delivery cadence, and developer mentorship.
Critical decisions
Begin engagements with customer research and build against explicit quality standards. Keep the design and implementation work inside one delivery practice.
System
A studio operating model and web implementations built with Ruby on Rails, Angular, and the JavaScript frameworks of the period.
Result
The studio delivered client work over several years and has since closed. This is an author-reported account; client-specific impact, financial value, and independent acceptance are not established here.
Handoff
The studio account describes standards validation and maintainability after handoff. Client-side records confirming individual transfers remain an evidence gap.
Evidence & limits
Source: authored studio account below. Independent client acceptance receipts remain to be established.
Have a commitment with no obvious system? Bring me the problem →
Technical documentation & source account
Uxiliary was a digital product and design studio in Spokane, Washington. I co-founded it in 2014 as creative developer and led a team of ten-plus across design and engineering, building web products and brand experiences for clients that ranged from local startups to the Fortune 500. I owned proposals, scope, daily delivery cadence, and junior-developer mentorship. The company has since closed.
What we did
We worked design first. Every engagement started with research: user profiles, traffic data, and the client's own read on their customers. From there we built responsive, standards compliant sites that held up from modern browsers back to legacy ones, met ADA Section 508 accessibility guidelines, and ran entirely over HTTPS.
The stack centered on Ruby on Rails, Angular, and the JavaScript frameworks of the day. Everything we shipped was validated against W3C compliance tools and built to stay scalable and maintainable after handoff.
Three principles ran through the work: quality, improvement, and leadership. We measured decisions against those three ideas, and pushed the team to keep learning and contributing to open source so the studio stayed current.
My role
As co-founder and creative developer I led the team and set the design driven approach. I owned strategy and client consulting, coordinated regional professional groups, and represented the studio in the Spokane technical and entrepreneurship community. The City of Spokane recognized that community work, and I completed the SBA Emerging Leaders program during this period.
Selected work
Uxiliary's work ranged from direct clients to national brand and product engagements delivered in partnership with agencies. Selected work:
- Amazon: Year in Book and Year in Review, interactive digital summaries of the company's year.
- MassMutual: digital experience for the financial-services firm, with 14Four.
- Novo Nordisk: digital work with Resolute Digital.
- Sumologic: redevelopment of sumologic.com, with Blink.
- MediaTek, Amtrak, and Avista (Avista Energy mobile app).
- Also: Blink, Fatdaddios, Inland Power, Northern Quest Casino, Redhook Beer (with Opus), Denali (with Struck), and Arbor Crest (with BHW1).