Apigee Kickstart

Kickstart needed a rethink.

Apigee offered an out-of-the-box Drupal 7 “Kickstart” theme that would get a new customer up and running with a developer portal right out of the gate, but it was far from optimal — user experiences were unintuitive, interfaces were cluttered and outdated, and the degree to which the portal could be easily customized to reflect a customer’s brand and existing API catalogue was extremely limited. On top of all that, it was not fully mobile-compatible.

What was meant to be an Apigee feature that would sell customers on the potential of a developer portal and serve them well until they built their own from the ground up, often times went right in the trash can. So there was some work to do.

Getting to work.

Based on my past experience with Apigee | Google Cloud, I was brought in to work with Apigee product teams and Drupal developers from Chapter Three, to create a new and improved version of Kickstart — remedying the known issues, while also creating a forward compatible build using Drupal 8. This would also be an opportunity to look at what leaders in the API space were doing with their developer portals, to make sure we were covering all of the key components a customer might want at their disposal.

My contracted role in the project spanned three months, where I worked on the user experience with our team and delivered designs for desktop and mobile, covering as many bases as I could. This included, but was not limited to, things like the portal’s landing page, API library and documentation, forums, blog, pricing and plans, API monetization, app management, team management, and account settings. I also designed user flows for account creation, login, checkout, etc.

Regarding the visual design, care was taken to make sure the experience looked clean and relatively unbranded out-of-box, while designing UI elements and components in a manner that allowed for easy customization based on a customer’s brand and visual assets. For demonstration purposes, the out-of-box experience depicts the portal as being run by a fictional business called Acme.

Members of the Apigee Sales team were included in the process, to assure that the new Kickstart met their needs and addressed what they had been seeing and hearing from customers. Based on feedback I received after I left the project, the update was very well received. In addition to successfully addressing Kickstart’s needs, we also put in motion improvements that would be implemented in Apigee’s API management platform.