Insight

Design for Developer Experience (DevEx) is the practice of using human-centered design to optimize how developers interact with their work environments. The goal is to create spaces where technical teams can focus on solving core business problems rather than wrestling with tools and infrastructure. Design for DevEx requires an understanding of technology and human factors like employee, customer, and vendor experiences. When building digital government services, design for DevEx can be especially useful within highly technical projects such as building out an agency's cloud infrastructure, modernizing a legacy system, or developing suites of new application programming interfaces (APIs). 

At Nava, designers and product teams practice DevEx by working alongside infrastructure engineers and developers. This centers humans and products at every layer of technical programs, from DevOps and data teams to APIs and developer tools. 

Design is not new to technical program spaces. For example, human factors engineering is a much older practice that focuses on ergonomics and usability. However, human factors engineering has a more narrow purview and may not consider the holistic experiences of technology operations at scale. DevEx is more like technical service design, considering all of the connective tissue between technology and people. 

We believe DevEx goes beyond traditional service design practices by optimizing the entire technical ecosystem, from governance structures, processes, and tools to organizational cultures that influence engineering teams. By combining modern engineering and human-centered best practices, DevEx fundamentally impacts how teams plan for, adopt, implement, and maintain government services. 

By focusing on the pillars of planning, adopting, implementing, and maintaining, designers can advocate for the value of design in technical programs. This can enhance every facet of government programs.

Setting a vision and plan

Though developing a shared vision and plan requires cross-team collaboration, designers are especially equipped to visualize complex ideas and foster collaboration.

Designers can accomplish this by understanding stakeholders’ needs. With design methodology like user research, designers might probe into which features developers need, how they feel about using certain tools, and how those tools impact administrative efficiency. Further, creating artifacts such as journey maps or maturity models can help designers visualize how technology will serve people over time. Understanding stakeholder needs can help designers set clear, human-centered goals, while visualization tools can foster cross-discipline collaboration.

For example, a team of Nava service designers collaborated with developers to set a vision for security and compliance offerings within a federal agency. This meant breaking down complex definitions of FISMA compliance standards and building shared services that all developer teams could use. This made it easier for teams to determine application compliance and increased security of the overall program.

This approach aligns all stakeholders on a shared vision grounded in meeting human needs and business goals while abiding by an agency’s policies. Further, using DevEx to align on a plan ensures that technology will be accessible, adaptable, and resilient for years to come. 

Adopting modern technology

When a government agency embarks on an enterprise modernization project, it’s not always easy to get stakeholder buy-in. Designers practicing DevEx can help build buy-in for technical programs through storytelling, streamlining operations, and shaping scopes of work.

Telling a cohesive story about enterprise modernization efforts and why they’re important can incite genuine interest among decision-makers and the public. Similarly, determining ways to save time and resources and minimize dependencies can help teams see how modernization will make workflows more efficient. Finally, partnering with product teams to identify how smaller pieces of work contribute to bigger efforts can help designers and product teams shape scopes of smaller initiatives. This may help stakeholders understand how seemingly small initiatives contribute to long-term modernization. 

For example, a team of Nava designers built buy-in by working with engineers to automate an agency’s cloud onboarding process. Historically, it took teams a long time to onboard onto the agency’s cloud infrastructure, disincentivizing them from moving to the cloud. 

For over a year, Nava designers partnered with engineers to map out the process of onboarding onto the agency’s cloud infrastructure. Through human-centered design, modern engineering practices, and iteration, these teams whittled down the onboarding process significantly: a single step in the process that used to take over two months now only takes 48 hours. This unblocked many teams from moving more of their applications to the cloud, which is more secure and efficient for the agency. 

Implementing shared practices

Designers can foster strong developer experiences by establishing shared practices that bridge organizational silos. Maintaining a consistent and human-centered focus on onboarding, standards, and practices can make a program’s offerings easy to set up, implement, and scale. It also makes cross-team collaboration more natural and efficient.

When teams have well-designed processes for sharing knowledge and making decisions based on developer needs, they're better equipped to respond to new information and changing requirements. This adaptability is essential in modern software development, where initial assumptions often need revision as teams learn more about needs and technical constraints.

Designers who want to implement great DevEx practices might promote shared documentation standards, consistent code review practices, and common tooling choices. This can foster cross-team or cross-product collaboration norms in multi-team environments. 

Modeling a culture of agile methodology is another way for designers to promote DevEx. This means setting a precedent of iteration rather than trying to define all of the answers up front. 

At Nava, we saw how shared practices helped resolve crossed wires at a government agency. Two technical teams at the agency were working within the same codebase but largely operating independently. Despite having skilled developers, the agency was initially struggling with an absence of design and research capabilities, leading to competing initiatives and unclear product direction. By creating a shared understanding of software capabilities and gaps, the teams were able to align their efforts effectively. This collaborative approach enabled them to identify gaps, scope solutions more easily, and learn from each other's expertise, ultimately strengthening their product direction.

Operations & maintenance 

To easily maintain a program’s health, security, and compliance, designers can work with engineers to develop strategies that bridge technical solutions and human needs. When teams create organizational resources and tools with human needs in mind, they reduce administrative burden and promote the adoption of human-centered solutions. 

To improve and increase operational efficiency within an organization, designers can leverage user research, system metrics, and other design methods. This will empower designers with qualitative and quantitative data to identify pain points, gaps, and opportunities for human-centered solutions that improve processes. 

For instance, a Nava designer on a technical team was working on maintaining an agency’s internal platform and saw an opportunity to improve operations. The designer built shared processes for a sandbox environment for application teams to test and develop applications. This enabled technical teams to iterate on their code without worrying about the bureaucratic hurdles required for launching a new application at this agency. As a result, teams were able to build and release applications in a fraction of the time, enabling quicker service delivery and better benefits administration. 

Conclusion

By combining modern engineering and human-centered design best practices, design for DevEx helps optimize experiences across an entire system. At Nava, we’ve seen how design for DevEx can help build buy-in for new services, improve communication through shared practices, and ensure effective operations and maintenance. For these reasons, design for DevEx is an excellent methodology for highly technical project teams looking to build programs in a human-centered way.