Developer
Platform

Covisint Developer Platform is an integrated IoT & Identity solution building experience that is not only strongly differentiated by its technology but is compelling, approachable and easy to use.

My role as UX/UI Designer

• Work with product managers and designers to conduct user testing and research.
• Conducted interviews with users and stakeholders.
• Conducted discovery workshops with stakeholders.
• Created a UX strategy with the product manager and engineers.
• Redesigned application from the ground up.
• Created user flows. 
• Created design system.

Challange

We validated many key points Covisint had already found, but we also found additional insights that helped us flesh out dev personas that we were designing for and contributed to us prioritizing certain features over others:

Solution

Developers prefer to have everything within reach (vs. navigating to a site like Github to code).
They get frustrated when forced to navigate away from the site to achieve a task. We added the sandbox to the build area within the existing developer site.

• The new system allows access to edit attributes or profiles of those entities.
• It provides a distinct area for visualising and defining the relationship (events, authorization, etc.) between those entity types.
• A developer team has the ability to experiment with the platform first-hand and modify the feature in the Covisint Sandbox (this prevents them from having to read through heavy amounts of research before they commit to the platform).

Developer Platform home page

Within the “Learn” section developers can view videos, training, starter apps, a coding cookbook, and documentation (he/she gets an overview of these things pre-login… more in-depth in post-login) 

Who are our developers

Industrial developer demographics:

Industries: Aerospace, Healthcare, Energy Management, Oil & Gas, Transportation, and Manufacturing.
Company size: 72% work in small to medium-sized companies with anywhere up to 1,000 employees.
Team size: small to medium and 58% of developers work in teams of between 2 and 25 individuals.
Specialize in: writing applications that monitor and diagnose industrial equipment.
Education: well educated with a majority holding at least a master’s degree.

Main concern: 37% of developers view security as a top threat.

Quantifying Developers Pain Points

37% of industrial developers view security as a top threat.
While writing source code for applications consumes 26% of their time, merely optimising for security, availability, and scale takes up to 40% average.
Almost 75% of developers spend their time on tasks other than innovation. (Ideally, they should be writing app code.)

Developer Platform starter applications.

Addressing Developers Needs

Developers have a heavy influence on a company’s decision to invest in an IoT platform. We validated many key points Covisint had already found, but we also found additional insights that helped us flesh out dev personas that we were designing for and contributed to us prioritizing certain features over others:

1. Environment setup: Setting up an environment is too difficult
2. Platform cohesion: How do the pieces between identity, messaging, and IoT tie together?
3. A place to experiment:  It’s not clear how to solve this problem with this platform…Product descriptions and detailed explanations aren’t a substitute for a developer sandbox.
4. Budget, security, reliability: It is mission critical for security to be integral to any platform solution. Devs are budget-conscious but still want a secure, reliable platform.
5. Platform fit: Having dev team review pages of research can be time-consuming and frustrating. 

Developer Platform post login example.

Post Login

• Post login solution building is a focused application view for building solutions to remove extraneous materials not specific to developing or administering a solution.
• We introduced a project dashboard with access to starter apps and developers’ solutions.
• Also, we introduced a team collaboration space where project owners can invite others and set their privilege level.
• Developers can see how things are assembled; the starter applications can function as a learning tool, or a dev can clone for his/her own purposes once enter projects, top nav is removed and enter ecosystem with device nav.
• We created a page that features example reference applications with brief descriptions.
• After viewing the reference applications, a dev can clone an existing reference app, for example, “Connected Cars”. 

People & Applications (or systems) sections are a subset of our identity solution — where profiles, division, app details are managed.
An integrated IoT build tool
Define and Edit Device Templates
Developers can select or create library items that make up the device template.
We developed a registry (catalog) of unique device instances.
Device templates define a physical device. Templates contain all the info pertinent to a specific device, including attributes, events, and commands.
Device templates enable developers teams to accelerate application development.

• The device template inspector shows all attributes, events, and commands associated with the template
• Attributes – bind them to events and associate with device templates that would be inherited by a device.
• Events – Data points generated by a device name, i.e., description or data type.  Events go upstream towards a platform. 
• Commands – Type of instruction you can create with a device, ie—create a command to turn on the car. Commands go downstream.
• Devices – actual physical instances of the device template
• Security, implementation, authorization.

Learnings

Developers prefer to have everything within reach (vs. navigating to a site like Github to code). 
They get frustrated when forced to navigate away from the site to achieve a task. We added the sandbox to the build area within the existing developer site.
Well documented APIs: developers find it hard to make a decision to purchase without well documented, useful APIs, finding details of the API w/o trawling through source code and tutorials. 
Coding Cookbook: Used to illustrate programming design patterns (where devs can find examples for their application) create concise “Recipes”, “Howtos”, or “Patterns” to explain how specific use cases are achieved. 
Developers have little time to make a decision on which tool to use: make the “out-of-the-box” experience work in 5 minutes or less.
Cookbook helps accelerate learning by providing photos on how specific use cases are achieved.