Forge Development Portal.

While at Xura (http://www.xura.com/) I was assigned with redesigning the development portal for the Forge SDK product. I was able to review the analytics collected over the past few months and survey results collected by the product owner. I was also asked to design the portal with the entire corporate website in mind and how all sections could fit within a responsive framework.

I then collected feedback from a steak-holder questionnaire I shared with CMO, CTO, Product Owner and Development Director.

5 personas were created incorporating the results , below are some highlights:

Q: What is your position and responsibility?
A: R&D and product management team for forge

Q: What’s your objective?
A: A clear website and portal that enables developers to self-serve easily on desktop, mobile, and tablet devices

Q: Your Main Targeted Demographic:
Who is YOUR primary visitor to the site?
A: Web and mobile app developers.

Q: What are they looking for?
A: Clear information (quick-starts, how-to, examples, documentation, pricing) on forge. The ability to create developer accounts, manage their apps (API keys and features), view statistics/usage info (to debug apps), help desk (Zendesk integration). Simple to use, no documentation or training required or provided to use the portal or website.

Q: How has this project evolved over the last year and how do you perceive it evolving over the next year?
A: Past year: launched in past year, basic desktop-only version, limited features and capabilities.
Next year: compete with [removed example’s] portal but with Xura (not [ removed example ]) budget

Q: How does the potential targeted customer understand all the things that need to be purchased and how they work together?
A: They don’t, and this is one of the things the new website and portal is needed for.

Q: Overall Impression:
Who do you believe are the primary visitors to this site?
A: forge website: 50/50 developers and managers looking for options developer portal: 100% developers

Q: How does the site contribute to the sales process?
A: For developers it is the sales process (long tail, come to the site after seeing us at an event or in a Google search)… For partners it’s something they go to after we’ve made contact.

Q: What information customers need to make a purchasing decision?
A: Price, features, ease of use (in other words total cost of using us). References. Licence, T’s & C’s, etc.