Developer portal – Abhinandan Dhole

Developer portal UX

Project:

Developer portal for, online retail coupon deal hosting partner companies of major retail brand.

Users:

Developers (employees) of partner organizations and developers from retail coupon hosting company.

Challenges:

1.Users were having challenges of getting information from Retail Company about API integration and due to lack of resources, they were doing to and fro communications using slack. This consumes lot of time to get clarity on API integration process.

2.Despite documentation provided by Retail Company, there was no real way to test, what users (Deal buyers) are doing and to test integration between partner and Retail company.

3.It was difficult to see the result on Retail company end. Retail company’s platform was like black box and there was no clue to understand the effect of users’ actions.

E.g.- User couldn’t see results of ingestions

Solution:

I created developer portal on Ghost CMS platform, to host the integration testing and simulations of deal UI.

User could set-up their platform and inform retail company about their server addresses and that could be mapped to retail company’s servers for hosting simulations and seeing the result in real time on browsers with UI to test.User can start by syncing the code and then by testing each step of deal UI, generated on different browser tab.

Project Duration: 4 months

What I did: Research and design ( 1 person)

· I did study of various deal hosting processes and software testing process between two servers.

· I did user interviews to understand the current challenges faced by them just to host 1 deal, which gave insights into communication gaps between two parties and time consumed in verifying the understanding needed to push the code for deal hosting.

· I created task flow models in Lucidchart, to verify my understanding of the process with actions needed by user’s and response needed by system.

· We followed MVP approach to create the design for shorter scope of ‘Things to Do’ related deals and used that pattern for other type of deals having complex processes of deal hosting.

· Final design proposal was tested using remotely moderated usability testing on InVision mockups

Achievements:

· Deal hosting time reduced from 6 month to 1 month for any coupon offer deal on retail company website

· Users can edit the deal and rehost it after approval in short time so that end customers could get more offers with discounts.

· This contributed to faster revenue generation for retail company as well as partner company.

Learning:

It was challenging to empathizing with user, because this was very technical process-oriented platform. This gave me chance to learn different technique like doing the process followed by user, something like method acting. Also, being single UX person on project, I did lots of hands-on activity and learned tools like Lucid chart and Zeplin for collaborative design.

Initial wireframes from task flow models

I created these wireframes in Lucidchart, based on initial inputs and understanding of the process. The intent of these mockups was to study and test the concepts with developers and other stakeholders for the process and feasibility study. These wireframes helped all the team to bring on same page of understanding and decide what should go in to MVP and start delivering the deals. Lot of features shown in these wireframes were later removed due to feasibility issues for short term goals and technical process output challenges.

Final visual designs ( Pixel perfect)

After multiple iterations reviews and usability testing, I converged on these designs. These are pixel perfect visual designs created using Sketch tool and posted in InVision. These are only key screens of the main application, shown here as samples.