Diving deep into the details of dev tools
Stedi, 2021–23Stedi is a US-based, globally remote startup building developer tools for the logistics and supply-chain sectors. As part of a small and very flat team at Stedi, I worked across a wide range of product functionality, design systems, documentation, and marketing material. The work involved a highly fluid mix of interface design, customer research, information architecture, copywriting, and some front-end development.
Key achievements were getting Stedi’s first true productivity offering — a data mapping tool — to market, developing a federated in-app navigation system to tie together disparate products running in different codebases, and refactoring the design system to improve ease of use and increase accessibility.
Stedi Mappings
A major part of my work at Stedi was building a developer-focused tool to map data from one JSON structure to another. By design and user-need this thing is dense and complex — think code editor meets Excel – designing for it was a great challenge. Some of this work was iterative improvements on the initial proof-of-concept build, some was setting new directions for the interface and products concepts.
“Reality has a surprising amount of detail”
The team at Stedi is very fond of this phrase, and it’s certainly true for a lot of interfaces.
This is a prototype I made to work out, with the team, how we should handle searching a tree of nodes. We needed to solve all the nuanced details of typing, pasting, highlighting matches, showing how many, navigating between them, keyboard shortcuts etc.
Working ‘dirty’
I find a lot of the critical parts of the product design process happen in unglamorous screens like this. Collections of ideas and questions provoked by customer observation, bugs, or product intuition. They include examples, wireframes, screengrabs, prototypes in code, plus lots and lots of team discussion.
The work on Stedi’s mapping product looked like this often – breaking down each key area and developing a thorough understanding of the highest value improvements. The changes themselves were varied: better flows for getting started; consolidating duplicative systems; simpler more immediate interactions; clearer copy; extra information to help navigate unfamiliar territory.
Other Stedi work
