Need: Cloudflare had been engaged as a partner by Apple to register domains on behalf of Apple users, as a co-branded experience within Apple’s device-native iCloud experience.
Response: Four separate teams were tasked with learning about and delivering what was required, over a four month project. Cloudflare’s desktop-exclusive platform that had never done a consumer integration, was our starting point. I was assigned to lead the UX discovery and delivery efforts, my second week at Cloudflare, with supporting help from another designer.
What’s the user see? Where did Cloudflare begin and end, and where did Apple begin and end? Whose APIs put what data into whose UIs, at which point, and on what surface?
Always starting low-fidelity, gathering information, and getting team alignment on goals and scope, before diving into (more low fidelity!) design solutioning.
Local currency quoting for customers outside the US. A tiiny but tricky detail.
The “Domains” desktop experience re-designed with a11y and mobile friendly components, on a responsive CSS Grid, and co-branding needs factored-in.
Project highlights
- Bringing a team of many disparate small teams together, to unify around the holistic experience from the user’s perspective to meet ambitious revenue and engineering goals.
- Partnering with the business team early, to ensure we understood Apple’s UX requirements and were prepared to meet or exceed them.
- Working directly with stakeholders at Apple throughout the four month project duration.
- Collaborating with multiple teams within Cloudflare’s early-maturity UX organization to ensure that everyone’s not-yet-operationalized interests could be met with this high-visibility project, and the team’s expectations managed.
- Part-time mentoring and partnering with another designer who’d long been developing ideas for Domains, to ensure that his foundational ideas made it into the final product.
- Filling-in for unavailable design systems and content design practitioners, to ensure new components met A- a11y standards, scaled elegantly between mobile and desktop experiences, made the most of iOS fussiness, adhered to plain-language standards while sounding human and friendly, and could all be re-used within Cloudflare’s core-dash platform on future projects.
- Navigating integration and policy details with Apple, Avalera, Stripe, and WHOIS to ensure that what users saw and read made sense, complied with regulatory needs, was brief and sounded human.
- Working with Cloudflare’s legal team and the the PM leads for Domains and Billing to polish many dusty corners previously neglected, of the existing Domains purchase experience.
- Balanced many different US state and global municipal regulatory needs governing web property sales, taxation, and data transparency concepts, between content authoring and location-based system logic.