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.
- Nike: internal contract-tracking system, with Opus.
- Intel: Compute Stick and vPro launch pages, with Opus.
- Dell: Dell World event experience, with Opus.
- 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).