Internal Developer Platform
Overview
My Role
UX Designer 2021 - September 2025
I lead all UX work focused around the Developer Experience (DevEx) in a small team of 6 people. 4 Developers, 1 Product Manager and myself.
The Challenge
In a platform focused org, Developers come across a range a challenges and complexities from finding existing services, APIs and documentation etc to consistency and standardization across tech stacks. Having these kinds of issues increases cognitive load for the Developers and ultimately has large implications on their productivity.
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It was my job to bring the new Internal Developer Platform (IDP) based on Spotifys Backstage to growth to help reduce these issues.
Below I will focus on 2 specific areas of improvement that I've worked on.
Goals
1
Improve Developer productivity
2
Improve discoverability and ownership of Documentation
Methodology
Triple Diamond Framework
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The Triple Diamond Framework is a powerful tool for problem solving and product design, using the diverge and converge process allows me to continuously develop and iterate a solution. Using this and working closely with Engineers and Product allows me to make sure we cover all aspects of Desirability, Feasibility and Viability.
UX
Engineering
Product
Desirability/Human
Viability/Business
Feasibility/Technical
Understanding the User
In order to understand our users we first wanted to speak with them directly, we chose to do this both in team groups but also 1:1, this allows us to speak with a broad group while still allowing individual thoughts to be shared.
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Because our customers are internal, it actually speeds up the process of interviewing and does away with the complications of finding the right target group.
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We would also utilise the quarterly DX survey results to pinpoint exact issues that developers across the company are having in their work.
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Once we had all of this information the data would be pulled together and colour coded. This Affinity Mapping was to help us understand common themes/problems that our users are facing.
Example Affinity Mapping for Enterprise Search Solution (AI)
Documentation Case Study
Documentation scored highly on the DX survey for issues that Developers had and this was also backed up by the interview research from our team.
Documentation scored - 25 points lower than the industry standard in 2023
- DX Survey
User 1 - UX
There's a lot of information that can be found about the different features that exist within our product, but this information tends to be scattered in many places:
- Confluence wiki
- Miro board
- Google Docs (less common)
- Slack
- Worst case in the heads of people who have worked on the feature in the past
User 2 - Developer LiveOps
Documentation has always been a problem, once written it becomes outdated by the next release. We should find a way that it is consistent and easy to produce.
User 3 - Developer Saga
Documentation becomes stale quite easily, and is insufficient in terms of feature testing
User 4 - Developer Events
We really need a search feature that works. The search on kingfluence is mostly garbage
Documentation Findability & Reliability
As the IDP team do not own the content of the documentation, but own the Documentation Hub, it is difficult for us to have an impact on the reliability of the documentation stored there. We decided to start with a Crazy 8 style Design Studio where the team brainstorm as many ideas as possible in a limited amount of time that could help solve this issue.
The outcomes were then spot checked with a group of Developers to see which of these options would be most helpful, a notification system proved to be the most popular option.
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The IDP records the 'Created' date of any documentation added therefore we added an 'Updated' column also so that users felt confident in the content they were consuming.
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Using mob programming the team and I made hi-fidelity mockups in Miro then translated these into the Sandbox system to continuously test with users.
We had previously introduced a notification system for when new research was published in the IDP therefore next steps will be to utilise this for reminders to documentation owners to check the content of their owned documents on a regular cadence.
Crazy 8 Design Studio in Miro
Hi-fidelity mockups in Miro
The next steps were to look at how we can improve the findability of scattered documentation as previously there had been no centralised place for it.
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One challenge we had is that creating and updating documentation is a very time consuming process for teams, unless it is continuously part of their CI/CD processes, this means that asking them to move all documentation to the IDP as a centralised hub is a very large task and one not likely to happen.
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We approached the AI team to understand if there was a way we could utilise an AI Enterprise Search to find documentation no matter where it is saved.
Enterprise Search Proof of Concept
IDP Internal Search and Enterprise Search Proof of Concept
Instead of replacing the IDP search with an Enterprise Search for the proof of concept, we decided to keep both searches so we had a comparison for our users.
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As the search style is different for an Enterprise Search we first started again with a Crazy 8 style Design Studio with Developers to understand what they expected to see.
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At the same time we did an AI Search Analysis for comparison on how this could work using Preplexity and Google.
Crazy 8 Design Studio
AI Search comparisons
Search Bar
AI Answer
Result Details
- Updated info
- Relevance score
- Specific sources
Source Listings
Feedback Options
- Required for improvements
Proof of Concept design
User Feedback
Further development work required
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- Sources difficult to see in a dropdown box, update to a visible list (under the search bar) and make them check boxes
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- 'Extend AI Answer' needs to be under the answer not in top right.
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- In Results utilise the source icons ie. Confluence, slack, Jira etc.
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- Users preferred the Enterprise Search, merge this with the IDP search, make IDP search a 'source' option.​
DX Survey Results for Documentation
2023
2024
2025
Increased satisfaction in Documentation from 2023 - 2025 after increasing Findability and Reliability
Outcomes
Since starting my role in the IDP we have seen continued growth of the platform.
+178%
Uplift in subscribed teams
+113%
Increase in Monthly Active Users (MAU)
+132%
Growth in documentation added to the IDP
+100%
Increase in software components added to the catalog
Lessons Learnt
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When working on backend tools is important to keep a close connection with Engineering, Product and UX. The Technical, Business and Human aspects are equally important in the growth of an IDP, especially in a predominantly Engineering org.
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​Create use cases that show the value! Users won't use the tool if they can't see realtime value such as time saved or reduced cognitive load.
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As a UX designer, get to know the full lifecycle flow: create - deploy - monitor - maintain. This makes it easier to understand user problems.​​