Industry:
IT Hardware, SaaS
Role:
Sr. UX Product Designer, IC
Challenge:
Transform and redesign an internal API Marketplace into public facing Dell Developer Center.
Users:
- Application Developers
- API Publishers
- Dell IT Managers
- Client Support Solution Engineers
Methods & Technologies:
- Design Sprints
- Affinity Mapping
- Site Audits
- Surveys
- Contextual Inquiry
- Requirements Gathering
- Wireframing
- Prototyping
- Competitive Analysis
- UI Design
- User Validation
- VQA
Outcomes:
- Released MVP to Production
- Reduction in Support interactions 70%
- Increased productivity 50%
- Tickets reduced by 25%
- rand Testing indicated Dell Developer Center design was preferred over competitors.
As part of Dell Technologies’ shift from hardware sales and manufacturing to XaaS (Everything as a Service), our team was assembled to convert an internal product to a public facing Dell Developer Experience portal.
Our UX team worked in a balanced team model with Developers, IT Architecture, and a Product Owner to transform the internal API Marketplace to the Dell Developer Experience.
Using HCD processes, we researched and developed an MVP and product feature roadmap for a modernized experience, while also supporting the API Marketplace until it could be retired.
Site Audit
One of the first exercises to understand the problem space was to do an audit of the existing API Marketplace. As a team of two we combined a heuristic evaluation of the UI, reviewed previous research documents, conducted user and stakeholder interviews to understand pain points, synthesized findings, and logged open questions into Miro to share with UX and Product teams.
Key experience challenges we identified included:
- Subscription Flow - How users would subscribe to an API.
- Publish Flow - How users would publish APIs for consumption.
- Environments and Gateways — How APIs would be made available for publishing and subscribing.
- Privacy Settings — segregating public and private APIs.
- Support — Portal administration, documentation, and notifications.
- Automation and Self Service — To reduce multiple manual touch-points that created bottlenecks.
Additional product opportunities identified:
- Performance and Observability Monitoring
- Engagement, Adoption, and Thought Leadership
- Upskilling, Learning, and Certification Tracks
Discovering Key Painpoints
We spent a lot of time understanding the problem space that we were solving for. We researched best practices for application development, but did not rely solely on what our competitors were doing to drive design decisions. We started by reaching out to the users of the API Marketplace to better understand what their daily workflow was like and what challenges they faced.
"I want to search, not browse"
Finding the right API quickly was critical to developers as there was an urgent, specific need that an API needed to be able to address. They did not want to browse or peruse API topics when they had a deadline.
"I want to see API documentation, use cases, and tutorials"
Users wanted to quickly find applicable, easy to follow tutorials based on use cases to implement the API, or when evaluating an API for use.
"Don’t make me wait"
Users wanted to spin up and test in API in less than 15 minutes. Waiting for permission access or waiting on support responses was one of the biggest bottlenecks.
"Root cause analysis"
Users wanted to quickly understand why and how an API’s performance could contribute to failures or MIMs.
Branding Test
Branding Test consisted of two versions of developer.dell.com — One with our current design system and one with modified brand elements (Challenger) to appeal to Millennial/GenZ. Test also included competitors’ Developer Experience product pages. They were all unbranded by removing logos and company names for the study purpose.
