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ComicViewer is a responsive web app that provides an immersive comic reading experience for online comics. The hybrid app, which works equally well on desktop, tablet and phone screens, features a vibrant browsing grid, user subscriptions/bookmarks, dark mode and intuitive navigation.

Notes:

• The web app can be viewed here.
• PWA-style pre-caching via Service Workers allows for continuous page loading even on slower connections.
• The codebase is written in plain JavaScript/Node and uses no frameworks. All design & code by Mike Stamm.

An animated, interactive presentation promoting Bitcoin, built for the New York Times. The sponsored article features cascading text animations and a full-screen slideshow detailing the history of currency. The slides are calibrated to the user's scroll movements, and the layout is fully responsive.

Notes:

• The sponsored article can be viewed here.
• The slideshow was developed using Waypoints.js and Zenscroll.js.
• Visual design by Hannah Ahn, New York Times.

This graphical UX overhaul for Cirrus CI features a collapsing sticky header, color-coded build status icons, compact typography and balanced negative space, optimized for ease of reading. As users of this platform needed to be able to operate from anywhere, the interface had to be fully responsive, from the smallest phone screens to the largest desktops.

Notes:

• "Success" states are left uncolored, to allow "failed" states to be more prominent.
• Secondary content is hidden inside expandable regions.
• UX design and implementation by Mike Stamm.

A fully-functional mockup of a proposed standalone player and playlist manager for spoken-audio news articles, this prototype accomodates a wide range of user-customizable options into an extremely small space.

Notes:

• The design uses a high-contrast color scheme, as this palette is associated with audio/video elements on the Post site.
• Audio playback relies on the Howler.js framework.
• UX design by Mike Stamm and Fonda Chen.

The percentage of users who reached the final page of the Washington Post’s subscription sign-up form was not as high as the company would have liked. This fully interactive mockup of a new streamlined visual design allowed every aspect of the sign-up process to be optimized and tested.

Notes:

• This streamlined user flow yielded a 20% increase in users completing the subscription check-out process.
• Seamless animated card-to-card movement was achieved by pre-rendering all cards offscreen.
• Visual design by Abby Aker and Mike Stamm.

The Washington Post’s Chrome extension replaces the user’s initial browser window with a colorful grid of news tiles, each of which links to an individual article. The extension leverages client-side caching and an extremely small codebase to ensure lightning-fast performance.

Notes:

• Download the Washington Post extension for Chrome
• Graphics load as optimized .webp format when supported; .jpg otherwise.
• Tile API by Washington Post Rainbow team.

A single-page-web-app version of the Washington Post’s mobile site, this PWA (Progressive Web App) version leveraged browser “Service Workers” to pre-fetch and cache content in the background, yielding browsing performance so well optimized that it even loads when offline. By separating the article content from the application "shell," the PWA could download and store up to 30 articles on each visit.

Notes:

• The technology was demoed on the main stage at Google IO 2016.
• PWA Service Workers only worked on Android at the time this prototype was built, but they are now supported on iPhone as well.
• Visual design by James Hobbs; back-end API work by Chris Nguyen.

When NASA released its open-source Martian geography data, the Washington Post decided to build an educational online micro-site to explore it. This interactive demo, built in Unity3D, featured a user-controllable Mars rover that explored a Martian landscape laid out with “beacons” that showcased educational facts about the ongoing Curiosity expedition.

Notes:

• Unity3D's WebGL support was pretty crude at the time, but there is a standalone desktop browser version.
• The Rover's control system was customized from a game plugin designed for 18-wheeler trucks.