I know how to parachute into chaos and create order. I can diagnose what's broken, adapt processes to fit reality, and ship quality work under tight deadlines.
That's how we rescued IBM's Developer Studio, with beta release only few weeks away!
CHALLENGE
It takes 6 to 8 weeks for admins to integrate legacy and on-premise applications with IBM Cloud. Traditionally, our users need to navigate an ecosystem of disjointed SDKs, siloed command-line utilities, and manual API configurations just to build a single connection!
BUSINESS GOAL
IBM Verify wanted to make a DIY tool where admins could build their own adapters, enabling secure connectivity with any external application the platform didn't support out of the box.
MY ROLE
I joined while the Early Access Program was already live! 20+ orgs across 5 countries were testing the product. Weekly feedback loops revealed severe usability bottlenecks: developers were encountering critical fields lacking context, ignoring dense instructional text, and getting completely blocked at key deployment steps.
So I had to paused production, partnered with engineering leadership, and redesigned a cohesive experience that met the beta timeline without requiring significant backend changes.
Reduction in customer-support tickets
"The creation flow finally matches how our team actually thinks about building adapters. The sequencing change alone saved us from a week of back-and-forth with the IBM team."
— EAP Participant, Emprest
"We've tested a lot of IAM tooling. This was the first time our team got through a full adapter configuration without stopping to ask each other what a field meant."
— EAP Participant, IntiGrow
"For the first time, I could jump straight to the mapping step without stepping through everything before it. That sounds small but it saved us hours across a week of testing."
— EAP Participant, Patecco
I found that as-is experience had a structural problem. So I ran a systematic evaluation across every step of the creation flow - annotating each screen by issue type and severity, cross-referenced against EAP session feedback. And presented the findings to engineering leadership. This was a set of 3 working sessions i hosted, with UX researcher, a content designer and UX engineer.
In as-is experience, the wizard had been built with a functional intent but had no experiential layer! Fields appeared without hierarchy. Required and optional inputs were treated identically. Instructions that should have been two sentences were paragraphs.
I redesigned the full creation flow with the focus on sequencing steps to match with how practitioners actually think, not how the system processes input.
Challenge: Our customer support team had 12+ tickets around a 30 second debug task! For users to view the raw-code to fix a single function required them to back track through every preceding wizard step.
Solution:
I pushed to change the metaphor: creation stays linear and guided. But once an adapter is saved for the first time, it becomes a navigable document - six chapter, jump to any of them directly. This reframing became the organizing principle for the entire feature.
