Designing a Developer Platform from 0 → 1

Overview & key outcomes

Venue.sh provides a unified platform for engineering teams to work more efficiently and consistently. As Lead UX Designer, I guided the product from concept to early adoption, ensuring that every interaction, workflow, and visual element reinforced the ease of setup, data automation, and workflow customisation.

By the end of the first iteration, we achieved measurable impact:

• Reduced onboarding time for new engineers: from 3–5 days to under 8 hours.

• Increased workflow efficiency: developers completed routine tasks 30% faster.

• Early adoption & engagement: over 80% of partner engineering teams actively used the platform within the first month.

• Trust & usability: user feedback indicated a 95% satisfaction rate with the platform's ability to automate processes and integrate with existing tools.

These outcomes validated our design approach and positioned Venue.sh as a credible, developer-friendly platform.

The Challenge: Transforming an Idea into a Usable Product

When I joined Venue.sh, the product existed only as an ambitious idea. Developers were struggling with fragmented tools, inconsistent documentation, and onboarding processes that wasted time and introduced errors. Internal platforms often attempted to solve these problems but were slow to adopt, cumbersome to maintain, and difficult to scale.

My role was to transform this abstract vision into a tangible, usable experience that developers would want to use. This involved designing a unified platform that reduced friction, accelerated workflows, and earned the trust of developers by empowering them with automation and flexibility.

Understanding the Developer Experience

To address these challenges, I dove deep into the developer experience. I conducted interviews with engineers across multiple teams, ran workshops with stakeholders, and analysed competitor platforms to understand gaps and opportunities.

Key Insights:

• Automation is non-negotiable: Developers spent too much time manually migrating data and setting up new tools. A truly valuable product needed to automate the process of getting data in.

• Customisation empowers teams: Developers needed the ability to adapt tools to their unique workflows, not conform to a rigid new system. The platform had to be built with plugins and connections in mind.

• Value from day one: The initial setup experience had to be seamless. Users needed to get value from the product immediately, without a steep learning curve or lengthy configuration.

These insights became the foundation for every design decision, guiding the structure of our core integrations, the plugin architecture, and the streamlined setup experience.

Designing the Solution

With insights in hand, I explored multiple approaches to simplify the setup process, automate data ingestion, and allow for extensive customisation. Low-fidelity prototypes tested different onboarding flows, data pipeline configurations, and plugin interfaces. Feedback from engineers highlighted friction points and guided iterative improvements.

Key Design Decision: Empower Users with Flexibility & Automation

Instead of creating a prescriptive, one-size-fits-all solution, we focused on building a flexible core platform. The primary design decision was to focus on automating the process of getting all their data into the product via robust integrations and connections. This removed a major barrier to adoption.

Simultaneously, we designed a plugin architecture that allowed teams to customise their workflows, giving them the power to extend and adapt the platform to their specific needs. This shift from prescriptive templates to an extensible toolkit was central to our success.

Designing for Scale: Modular Design System

As the sole design lead, I also developed a modular design system to ensure consistency across workflows and devices. The visual language conveyed reliability and modernity, helping Venue.sh earn credibility with developers. This system was designed to support the development of new plugins and integrations, ensuring a consistent and scalable foundation for future features.

Impact:

• Consistent experiences: across all core features and third-party plugins.

• Predictable interactions: that reduce errors and build user trust in the platform's stability.

• Scalable foundation: for adding new features and integrations without redesigning core flows.ws

Outcomes and Reflection

The redesigned Venue.sh platform delivered tangible results:

• Onboarding time for new engineers dropped from 3–5 days to under 8 hours.

• Developers completed routine tasks 30% faster, increasing workflow efficiency by 30%.

• Over 80% of partner engineering teams actively used the platform within the first month.

• User satisfaction with clarity and ease of use reached 95%.

Reflecting on the project, I learned that focusing on automation, deep integration, and customization allows designers to create tools that developers actually want to use. The project reinforced the power of user-centered design in building platforms that reduce friction, accelerate workflows, and earn trust by empowering users to work in the way that suits them best.