Skaffolder UX Case study — How to create a user experience on a platform you don’t know how to use yourself
By: Gloria Nervi
Tags: Ux Case Study, Platform, UX Research, UX Design, Uxui Design

1. Overview

The problem

Every time a developer starts a new project, he (/she) needs to write from scratch the scaffolding of the code, copying and pasting bits and pieces of code from other projects, before he can concentrate on the actual “fun” part. This process is boring and time consuming, as well as a big waste of money for companies.

What is Skaffolder?

Skaffolder is a web app that helps developers build custom web and mobile applications faster, building it through an interface instead of writing lines and lines of code.

Users and audience

Freelance developers, software houses, big companies that need internal softwares and require a standard

Roles and responsibility

Skaffolder was born as a start-up, and I was the only UX designer in the team. I worked closely with Luca, the CEO of Skaffolder and the developer that came up with the concept of Skaffolder in the first place (he developed it as thesis of his master degree)

2. The process

The Research

In a way, it was a good thing that I was so far out the target of this project: this way I could stay completely unbiased to the research results and really focus on what users needed rather than what I thought they needed.

I started by analyzing the other platforms that where doing a similar jobs and pointed out what worked and what didn’t. Then we interviewed developers to understand their attitudes, needs, and experiences, both through focus groups and one-on-one interviews.

Data collected

Protopersonas

Challenges

・Developers are a though crowd, they like to feel like they are in control of what they do, they trust their code and they are “know-it-alls”

・There is no limit for how big a project can be, so the platform needs to stay functional even when there are 300 pages to navigate through, and the developers need to be able to find what they need easily

・Softwares for developers look boring.They usually look like they have been designed in the past century

Goals

・Easy to use for all kinds of developers, from students to big companies CTOs

・Create a platform that developers can trust and feel like the are still in control

・Make it as tidy as possible so it doesn’t become a mess after working on it for a few hours

・Make it look fun and like it actually belongs in 2018

Userflow

Prototypes

We tested a lot of different prototypes adjusting according to the feedback before finally landing on the one we thought was the best solution

Prototype 1:

This is the first prototype we tested, which worked on small projects and received a fairly positive feedback from the developers we tested it on, but once we released the beta version we started getting the complain that as the project was getting bigger, it was getting very hard to navigate through the models. We had to work on the usability.

Prototype 2:

We asked developers a simple question “Would you rather have a “UML-like” view of your project, or a list of the items in your project always at sight? 79% of the interviewed opted for the second answer, which led us to this new prototype

3. The Solution