A Developer Onboarding Flow for API Auth, SDK Generation, and Environment Bootstrapping

Year

2024

Role

Solo designer

Duration

On going side project for 6 months

Context

During Foundry’s transition from low-code workflows to a developer-first, pro-code platform, the Dev Console emerged as the backbone for onboarding developers into building and managing custom applications with Palantir SDKs.

Foundry’s Developer Console supported powerful workflows—API authentication, Ontology SDK generation, and environment setup—but onboarding was fragmented.

Developers struggled to understand:

how applications, OAuth clients, and SDKs related to each other
where to start, and what to do next, without prior platform knowledge
how to move across setup, packaging, and documentation without getting lost

The result was high cognitive load during first-time setup and frequent drop-off before developers reached a “working SDK” moment.

What we built

I led the end-to-end design of a guided developer onboarding experience, aligning mental models, navigation, and brand clarity across the Dev Console.

Key contributions included:

Clearer mental models & IA
- Distinguished Dev Console (platform) vs Dev Console apps (resources)
- Simplified relationships between Applications, OAuth clients, OSDK, and Platform SDKs
Guided app creation
- Designed a step-by-step wizard surfacing SDK options at the right time
- Explained tradeoffs between OSDK and Platform SDK during setup
Navigation redesign
- Reduced deep tab overload and location confusion
- Explored collapsible sidebars, documentation access patterns, and workflow context cues
OSDK packaging workflow
- Reframed “Repo vs SDK Version” into a more intuitive version-first model
- Designed a wizard-style version creation flow with clear history and drill-down
Shared systems & components
- Designed reusable resource tables adopted across Dev Console and Compass
- Aligned with Blueprint design system while extending it for developer-specific needs

This work connected onboarding, SDK generation, permissions, and documentation into a more coherent end-to-end developer journey.

This is a brief snapshot of the project—if you’re interested in the deeper story behind the research, exploration, iteration, and testing, I’d love to walk through it in conversation.