Closing the knowledge gap

From meeting functional requirements to crafting developer experience.

In Appvia Wayfinder, every action began with a form — yet each was built differently, cluttered, and hard to follow. I led the redesign of a unified form system that brought clarity, consistency, and polish to the product. By pausing feature development to create one reusable component, we doubled delivery speed and replaced twenty disconnected forms with a cohesive experience.

The biggest lesson I learned designing this B2B flow is simple: professionals already do the work, just differently. The role of design is to close the gap between their existing workflows and how the same tasks can be done faster and more reliably with our product. This is especially true during free trials when value must be instantly clear.

Over three years designing developer tools, I distilled what I learned about good developer experience into a scorecard to guide and evaluate design decisions:

Respect the source of truth —Keep UI, CLI, and live infrastructure in sync, and make it clear how every user action affects what’s in production.
Reduce cognitive load, not control — developers should move fast, yet still have the freedom to override defaults when needed.
Meet developers where they are — fit into existing workflows and mental models, not against them.
Design for debugging — make errors clear, contextual, and actionable.
Craft for trust — sweat the details; design signals quality.

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