Scalable developer experiences
As the developer platform evolved, aligning the needs of builders and buyers became more challenging, especially when explaining how multiple services could work together in real-world scenarios.
Company:
TomTom
Role:
Senior Designer
Year:
2022 - 2025
Objective
Create a cohesive experience that helps developers and decision-makers:
Understand the value of TomTom APIs and SDKs faster
Learn how different services work together in practice
Move smoothly from discovery to adoption
This meant reducing cognitive load while preserving the flexibility and power expected from a technical platform.
Process
I approached documentation, dashboards, and demos as interconnected parts of a single journey rather than separate products.
The work started by analyzing how developers navigated the documentation, where they got stuck, and what questions buyers needed answered early in the evaluation process.
From there, I worked closely with product, engineering, and customer-facing teams to:
Restructure the documentation portal around developer goals
Define clear learning paths and entry points
Identify real-world scenarios that could be translated into demos
Establish a dedicated design system focused on Developer Experience and Customer Enablement
Solution
The solution unified documentation, dashboards, and demos into a consistent and scalable experience.
The improved documentation portal became the foundation, offering clearer navigation, practical SDK examples, and dashboards that made usage and limits easier to understand.
On top of that foundation, interactive demos such as Matrix API for logistics routing, Traffic Index showing data and map display and TomTom Discover showcased how APIs and SDKs could be combined in realistic scenarios.
These experiences helped both builders and buyers quickly grasp value without requiring deep technical knowledge upfront.
Together, these touchpoints formed a cohesive system that supported learning, evaluation, and long-term adoption.
Key takeaways
Developer Experience is a product, not a support layer
Clear structure and visual consistency reduce friction in complex systems
Demos are critical for turning abstract APIs into tangible value
Documentation, dashboards, and demos are strongest when designed as a single ecosystem
