Mugshots
Well, yuck.
For the Tampa Bay Times newspaper, Mugshots was a website that scraped local law enforcement databases in order to benefit financially from the worst impulses of humanity.
The Tampa Bay Times eliminated the site in 2020.
The Problem
The website was ugly and outdated. The powers-that-be wanted to spruce up the exploitation of the downtrodden and increase reciruclation for more ad revenue.
The Solution
The goal was to make Mugshots more like Tindr, allowing users to simply swipe on mobile devices to run through galleries of mugshots.
A more robust filtering system was implemented to allow users to more easily look up certain types of mugshots.
My Role
I generated several redesign mock-ups in Sketch and reviewed them with stakeholders to outline possible styles and modes of functionality.
While I worked on mock-ups and revisions, other members of the team built a backend with Drupal and connected it to local law enforcment APIs.
After the mock-up revisions were approved and a plan was developed, and after the backend was up and running, I built out the frontend with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Throughout, I worked with the backend team members to integrate the data with the presentation.
The Result
The site looked and functioned much better, with increased recirculation and ad revenue. Then it was taken down.