FedEx Developer Portal

FedEx’s developer experience was split across five disconnected tools. Five logins, no shared patterns, no single source of truth — and developers were abandoning before they ever saw product value.

The project came to Tank Design as a documentation refresh. Research showed the barrier wasn’t content: developers never got far enough to read it. I made the case for a full platform redesign instead, and won the budget to deliver it.

I led product and UX design for nearly three years, working with FedEx engineering and product teams from research through delivery: journey mapping, information architecture, interaction design, the design system, and biweekly usability testing across four countries.

• Five separate tools and five logins became one governed platform with a single onboarding path, live in production for thousands of FedEx developers worldwide.
• Failure paths in webhooks and account setup were promoted from error states to designed lanes, each with its own content, actions, and recovery.
• Shared patterns for API status, billing, webhooks, and account management now scale across business units inside FedEx’s 1DX system.

Developer platforms hide their value behind sign-up walls. This one answers three questions before asking for an account: what can I build, how hard is it, and how good are the docs.

Webhooks push real-time shipment data into warehouse dashboards, and a misconfiguration breaks a logistics loop. I designed for the four paths that don’t end in success: no billing account, no shipping account, accounts already associated, contributor without permission.

Tests with real developers told us trust is built or lost in the failure paths. Each one became a first-class lane with its own content, actions, and recovery.

The post-login home isn’t one screen. It’s four states: new user, organization created, accounts added, full administrator. Simple on day one, deeper as needs grow.

Toast, alert, modal, and gate are named types with shared structure and variable interpolation. The live copy file uses the same primitive across every surface — consistency at scale, without copy-pasting.

Onboarding through production, every key moment mapped. The platform’s structure was shaped decision by decision.

This is a working artifact, not a screenshot. Click through the five calls to see how the structure took shape.

I led the design library updates, running weekly workshops with FedEx’s internal brand team so the platform and the broader system evolved together. Every pattern authored once, documented with its full set of states.

The platform is live in production — pre- and post-login, APIs, webhooks, organization admin, and the design library — used by thousands of FedEx developers worldwide and validated through continuous research.

• Made the case that a documentation refresh was really a platform problem, and won the budget to deliver it.
• Ran weekly design-library workshops with FedEx’s internal brand team so the platform and the broader 1DX system evolved together.
• Synthesized 26 research rounds a year into product direction and PI design briefs across two increment cycles.
• Worked directly with engineering through delivery so design intent survived implementation.

Start the failure-path research earlier. Testing taught us that trust is built or lost when things go wrong, but that insight arrived mid-stream, after the happy paths were already designed. The recovery lanes for webhooks and account setup would have been stronger sooner if we had led with them. It’s now the first question I ask on any platform project.