Marvin Sum

Foodspotting

August 2012

Foodspotting is a visual guide to good food and where to find it. Launched in 2010, it has received attention from Techcrunch, Mashable, Fast Company, The Wall Street Journal and CNN blogs.

It was also named one of Time Magazine’s 50 Best Websites of 2010 and a “Top Travel Application” by Travel + Leisure magazine. I worked with the Foodspotting team to redesign their entire web experience. These are some of the highlights.

Explore

With new features being added to Foodspotting, the old website was growing less and less intuitive. I redesigned the Explore screens, making it easier for users to find great dishes anywhere in the world.

Reviews

These pages highlight individual food items ‘spotted’ by Foodspotting users; they are shared on Facebook and Twitter regularly. I redesigned these pages for maximum impact, while ensuring that the millions of existing food items still worked well with the new layout.

Emails

Prior to the redesign, Foodspotting users received notifications and announcements in the form of plain text emails. I designed and coded responsive HTML emails that render beautifully on desktop, mobile and retina displays.

Openflea

February 2012

Openflea is an online flea market for female apparel. It was a side project put together in under a month to validate certain assumptions of the South-East Asian market. As of now, the project is less than 6 months old, generates revenue, and has a group of satisfied customers & merchants.

I was involved with the user experience and visual design, including the front-end work in HTML5/CSS3. On the backend, I crafted a solution that involved a custom-install of Drupal with Shopify integration. We also incorporated many practices from the Lean Startup philosophy for both product and customer development.

Designing for Mobile

With a significant number of users visiting Openflea on iOS devices, it made sense to create an iOS app. Even though the current site works acceptably on mobile devices, the experience could still be improved by going native. I designed the user experience as well as the user interfaces. The iOS app is currently a work in progress.

Basement 2

August 2011

I started Basement 2 to learn about ecommerce behaviours & trends in South-East Asia. The idea was to begin with a super-simple ecommerce platform to observe how local merchants and buyers would interact. Using the Lean Startup methodology, I iterated numerous times to validate assumptions.

As the technical founder, I single-handedly conceptualized, designed and built the product from start to finish. I created the wireframes, high-fidelity mockups (Photoshop & Illustrator), frontend code (HTML5, CSS3 & Javascript) & backend engineering (CakePHP & Amazon Web Services).

280 Slides

May 2008

280 Slides is a web-based application for creating presentations; a PowerPoint or Keynote for the web, if you will. Built on the Cappuccino web framework, I worked in conjunction with MetaLab to architect valid and semantically correct XHTML/CSS for the product pages.

According to Chris Anderson of Ars Technica, “280 Slides is a very impressive presentation app that … runs smoothly and seamlessly. On Mac OS X, it’s easy to forget that it’s running in a browser and not directly on the desktop.” In August 2010, the parent company, 280 North, Inc. (also a Y Combinator company), was acquired by Motorola.

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