Media
Silver winner of New York Design Awards 2020, DrivenxDesign awards. The Dev Platform & Tools category recognizes design that leads the way in technology and innovation. The category honors platforms and services that speed up the development lifecycle and power design-driven features and experiences that would have taken years to bring to market. Global VP of Design in IBM Cloud Data & AI wrote of the achievement here.
What is Codewind?
Eclipse Codewind is an open source project that makes it easier for developers to create cloud-native, containerized applications within their favorite integrated developer environment (IDE).
My role and business objective
In addition to owning the branding and web design, my primary role in this project was to lead lead a design team of three in the user experience, research and visual design. Building and developing cloud native, containerized applications is incredibly complex. Traditionally, a developer creates their own application stack for a containerized microservice that also fits their preferred language. Containerized development requires more infrastructure requirements and infrastructure knowledge than the developer needs to have. Codewind simplifies this process by providing an 'out-the-box,' one-click creation/build/run experience without any prerequisite containerization or web service knowledge needed.
The key users and how they were identified
We were very fortunate to have the key persona for this project available all around us; the developer. Extensive research was conducted by the Researcher, Rachel Chen, through interviews to gain a solid understanding of the as-is experience. Rachel conducted multiple playbacks to the larger team. The most valuable piece of information she discovered was that most app developer don’t care about Kubernetes set-up, stacks and monitoring. The developer just wants to code.
Wireframes for Performance Manager Dashboard
How our team was agile and used Design Thinking that fed directly into the CICD pipeline
Leading this team required a very close cadence with the back-end development managers who owned the solution. The User Experience designer on my team, Guy Loret de Mola, worked with them daily to build a smooth and integrated experience into the IDE. The IDE for our use case was Visual Studio Code.
How the solution became successful as an OpenSource offering in the industry
After being tested with users and proving it’s success, Codewind was evaluated and adopted by the Eclipse Foundation, which made it easily adoptable by the OpenSource community of developers. In 2020 it won the DrivenXDesign Silver Award in New York.