Are you a designer who can code?
Geni is an award-winning consumer web startup with a deep mission, one of the best teams in the Los Angeles area, and the resources to become a useful and enduring service for nearly everyone in the world. We're trying to answer the age-old question, Where did we all come from? and we need your expertise.
Geni seeks an experienced "designer who can code," the combination role of designing and implementing clear, efficient features that allow our users to complete a variety of tasks as they use Geni.com.
What is Geni?
Geni's goal is to solve the problem of genealogy.
Conventional genealogy applications and websites are primarily individual research tools. Users search public records and build their own family trees, separate from the trees of others. Thus, every family tree is potentially a duplicate of past work. We think this is wasteful, and ultimately harmful to the real purpose of genealogy: constructing one definitive record of lineage.
By contrast, Geni is building a single world family tree, through an approach we call Collaborative Genealogy. Equal parts matching algorithms and social network, only Geni creates a single comprehensive record of human descent via millions of users working together. We do this by wrapping advanced merging and change-management technology within a simple, interactive user interface. We mask deep complexity with a fun website that, quite literally, a grandmother can use.
The Job
You will own the interaction design of many key features on the Geni.com website. Your work will be seen by millions of people.
Projects may vary from wholly new interfaces for our core technologies, to optimizing targeted interactions like SEO-driven signup flows. You'll use rapid prototyping methods to go from whiteboard sketches to pixel-accurate mockups for engineers. Your knowledge should encompass what's possible with HTML, CSS and the common JavaScript frameworks, as you'll often see your projects through to the implementation of the front end.
We're hoping that you, like most experts, have devised your own way of doing things. Ideally these themes will be involved:
* Iterative approach
* Designing for user workflow as well as aesthetics
* HCI concepts and disciplines like feedback, affordance, and information architecture
* Visual mockup tools like Photoshop and OmniGraffle
* Coding up your final designs in standards-compliant HTML and CSS
* Excellent communication skills
Geni is biased towards execution. We favor quick iterations, lightweight specifications, and hallway conversations over long meetings. If you're used to highly segmented teams with a lot of hand-offs and waiting around, this may not be the place for you. We've built our team to be flexible and agile. Working here is the opposite of slow.
The Company
Geni was founded by a team of mostly San Francisco Bay Area expatriates, and we've tried to duplicate that culture down here in West Hollywood: we value work over face-time, provide the best equipment and chairs (but cheap desks and no cubes), and lunch and dinner are on us. Geni offers competitive salary and equity, and a complete benefits package.
We are led by David Sacks, the original COO of PayPal, who was instrumental in making that service useful and profitable. We enjoy ample funding and guidance from investors like Founders Fund and Charles River Ventures.
We love technology. To get things done, we employ ticketing systems, wikis, and Yammer, the short messaging web service that we built, and then spun off to help all companies communicate more effectively. Join us and see far you can go.
Next Steps
The best way to understand Geni is to try it out. Create a family tree and see if you understand what we're attempting. If so, drop us a line at jobs@geni.com.![]()
Geni is an award-winning consumer web startup with a deep mission, one of the best teams in the Los Angeles area, and the resources to become a useful and enduring service for nearly everyone in the world. We're trying to answer the age-old question, Where did we all come from? and we need your expertise.
Geni seeks an experienced "designer who can code," the combination role of designing and implementing clear, efficient features that allow our users to complete a variety of tasks as they use Geni.com.
What is Geni?
Geni's goal is to solve the problem of genealogy.
Conventional genealogy applications and websites are primarily individual research tools. Users search public records and build their own family trees, separate from the trees of others. Thus, every family tree is potentially a duplicate of past work. We think this is wasteful, and ultimately harmful to the real purpose of genealogy: constructing one definitive record of lineage.
By contrast, Geni is building a single world family tree, through an approach we call Collaborative Genealogy. Equal parts matching algorithms and social network, only Geni creates a single comprehensive record of human descent via millions of users working together. We do this by wrapping advanced merging and change-management technology within a simple, interactive user interface. We mask deep complexity with a fun website that, quite literally, a grandmother can use.
The Job
You will own the interaction design of many key features on the Geni.com website. Your work will be seen by millions of people.
Projects may vary from wholly new interfaces for our core technologies, to optimizing targeted interactions like SEO-driven signup flows. You'll use rapid prototyping methods to go from whiteboard sketches to pixel-accurate mockups for engineers. Your knowledge should encompass what's possible with HTML, CSS and the common JavaScript frameworks, as you'll often see your projects through to the implementation of the front end.
We're hoping that you, like most experts, have devised your own way of doing things. Ideally these themes will be involved:
* Iterative approach
* Designing for user workflow as well as aesthetics
* HCI concepts and disciplines like feedback, affordance, and information architecture
* Visual mockup tools like Photoshop and OmniGraffle
* Coding up your final designs in standards-compliant HTML and CSS
* Excellent communication skills
Geni is biased towards execution. We favor quick iterations, lightweight specifications, and hallway conversations over long meetings. If you're used to highly segmented teams with a lot of hand-offs and waiting around, this may not be the place for you. We've built our team to be flexible and agile. Working here is the opposite of slow.
The Company
Geni was founded by a team of mostly San Francisco Bay Area expatriates, and we've tried to duplicate that culture down here in West Hollywood: we value work over face-time, provide the best equipment and chairs (but cheap desks and no cubes), and lunch and dinner are on us. Geni offers competitive salary and equity, and a complete benefits package.
We are led by David Sacks, the original COO of PayPal, who was instrumental in making that service useful and profitable. We enjoy ample funding and guidance from investors like Founders Fund and Charles River Ventures.
We love technology. To get things done, we employ ticketing systems, wikis, and Yammer, the short messaging web service that we built, and then spun off to help all companies communicate more effectively. Join us and see far you can go.
Next Steps
The best way to understand Geni is to try it out. Create a family tree and see if you understand what we're attempting. If so, drop us a line at jobs@geni.com.
Source: Joel On Software