Building developer tools for a seamless development platform
Project overview
At a glance
Responsibilities: Researcher, Interaction Designer, Visual Designer
Platform: Web application
Methods: User interviews, product roadmapping, competitive analysis, sketching, wireframes, usability testing, branding, visual design, prototyping
Summary
I led the UX research, architecture and visual design for the cloud team that developed a new developer platform at American Express currently used by thousands of developers.
We validated the designs with users and proposed multiple visual explorations leveraging the organization's strong and seasoned brand guidelines. The resulting product simplified the developer workflow by surfacing relevant information pulled from APIs at relevant times and making it clear when and where issues arise in the system.
Design problem
How might we reduce the complexity of relying on multiple legacy software to enable developers to build better products for consumers?
Understanding backend architecture and its complexities
Conducting formative research
To understand the problem space and empathize with the users, research was conducted in 2 parts:
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I led user interviews with internal developers to identify pain points and opportunities to improve workflows.
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We conducted a comparative analysis of the workflows and features of other developer tools in this space.
Strategizing the product roadmap
To align stakeholders to the vision for the product, we conducted a product roadmap workshop to identify the core touch points in the product for users, document user and business insights for each scenario, and prioritize the scenarios for an MVP.
Simplifying workflows
Our goal was to increase the intuitiveness, efficiency, and learnability of the process.As we documented the user workflows, we simplified where possible and kept the following design problems in mind:
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HMW seamless integrate other tools into the app?
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HMW surface relevant information at the appropriate time?
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HMW help users identify, understand, and resolve issues quickly and easily?
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HMW remove reliance on the support team?
Ideating on UI
The main goals of the user in this system are to diagnose issues and work on fixing issues. We worked on variations to prioritize system health readings and guide them on where issues need to be resolved.
Leading usability study
I led a usability study to validate the designs for intuitiveness, learnability, and efficiency. We found that the designed flows were intuitive, although some of the terminology needed to be changed to fit user mental models and help guide them on where to complete tasks
Defining the look and feel
Leveraging some of the internal design language systems and brand foundations, I proposed multiple concepts to the stakeholders that ranged from a more conservative style true to their brand guidelines to more exploratory and futuristic styles.
