Project
Skype Developer Platform
Skype is one of the most iconic communication products of the 21st century internet era.
Skype led the way for remote communication tools and initially had its unique selling point on a peer-to-peer connection that allowed users to have phone and later video conversations without a centralized server infrastructure.
With 3 billion minutes of conversations every day in 2017, Skype seized the opportunity to provide an open Chatboot tooling system for developers by launching a developer platform, allowing developers to build smart applications via API. Dev.skype.com has been discontinued in 2020.
Worth diving into
Target of launching the first version of the Skype Developer Platform was to introduce developers with a well made, nice looking tool that invited to play around and look like something worth diving into.
Inspire & invite
As the design lead of the project, the team and I worked out the idea to use flat digital illustrations with a portion of playfulness while not expanding too far from the brand identity. We aimed to visually convey the vast amount of communication that happened every second.
Usability first
Key action of the developer platform is having a solid conversion rate from page visits to developer engagement. It was obligatory to create a seamless user experience to install and start working with the bot ecosystem for various infrastructures.
From hackers for hackers
While working for Hackerbay at that time, the internal team culture was enriched with daily developer engagement tinkering with frameworks, tools and building prototypes. “We basically built the v1 for ourselves” – which is probably the reason why the outcome succeeded so well (and why it diverged quite a bit from Microsofts CI guidelines ;)).