Transforming Developer Mode Home Pages into Productivity Hubs
Redesigned the Developer Mode landing experience for both Developer and Admin users, evolving two distinct home pages from static listing screens into productivity-oriented hubs focused on resuming work, quick actions, and workflow visibility.
The Gap
Business gap
Developer Mode in Workhall is accessible by two distinct user types: Developers, who can perform a defined set of workflow and asset operations, and Admins, who have access to the full Developer capability set plus platform-level controls. Despite this role distinction, both user types landed on the same static listing screen, one that lacked contextual actions, role-specific awareness, and quick access to assets. This made it difficult for either user type to resume work efficiently and limited the platform’s ability to surface its full capabilities.
User gap
Both Developers and Admins logging into Developer Mode shared a clear intent: resume an existing workflow, act on assets, or create something new. However, a single undifferentiated home page forced all users through the same navigation path regardless of their role and capabilities. Developers were exposed to patterns irrelevant to their permission set, while Admins had no fast path to their broader oversight functions. This created friction for both user types and failed to reflect the real difference in how each role operates on the platform.
As a live enterprise product under IP protection, design artefacts and screens cannot be shared publicly. Impact is documented through process evidence, stakeholder outcomes, and roadmap adoption rather than quantitative metrics.
How I worked
Research
Conducted competitive benchmarking across several developer and no-code platforms including ClickUp, Notion, Retool, Bubble, Appian, Monday, and Netlify. These platforms consistently treated their landing experience as a ‘resume + act’ hub where users can quickly access recent work, perform quick actions, and monitor activity. Internal gap mapping revealed that Workhall lacked key features such as recent work visibility, pinned assets, activity awareness, and contextual quick actions.
Strategy
The strategy focused on designing two distinct but cohesive home page experiences within the same Developer Mode shell, each calibrated to how that user type actually operates. The Developer home was designed as a personal productivity surface: fast access to recently used assets, pinned favorites, an AI-assisted command interface, and a recency-driven landing that feels aware of the individual. The Admin home was designed as a platform command center: system health at a glance, workflow and automation performance insights, user and access oversight, proactive AI-generated alerts, and quick actions scoped to admin-level operations. Both surfaces share the same core landing intent (resume work fast, act without navigating) but express it through fundamentally different information architectures.
Wireframes
Layout explorations for the Developer home tested multiple approaches to surfacing recency and reducing time-to-work: a My Nodes panel for quick node access, a Favorites layer for pinned workflows and apps, a Recently Accessed grid for asset resumption, and an AI Assistance command bar with contextual suggested prompts. For the Admin home, explorations focused on balancing monitoring density with actionability, testing configurations for Platform Health metrics, Workflow & Automation Insights (top performing, recent failures, longest running), User & Access Management panels, and a system alerts surface that surfaces critical issues without dominating the interface. Both final layouts were validated against the shared constraint of working within Workhall’s existing navigation shell.
Iterations
Developer home iterations concentrated on the AI Assistance entry point, testing how prominently to feature the command bar versus ambient content, and how to make suggested prompts feel genuinely contextual rather than generic. Admin home iterations focused on information hierarchy: the surface carries significantly more data types than the Developer view, requiring multiple rounds of density calibration to prevent the page from reading as a reporting screen rather than a landing hub. Both surfaces were iterated with AI tools to simulate role-specific user intents across varying workflow states before finalising the layout direction.
What we built
The redesigned Developer Mode delivers two role-calibrated home pages within a shared shell. The Developer home greets users personally, surfaces recently accessed assets and pinned favorites for instant resumption, provides an AI Assistance command bar with contextual suggested prompts, and organises relevant nodes for quick access, all scoped to what a Developer can act on. The Admin home operates as a platform command center: live system health metrics, workflow and automation performance insights across the platform, user and access management with role distribution visibility, proactive AI-generated insights, system alert monitoring, and admin-specific quick actions. Both surfaces prioritise actionable content over passive listings and structure information around how each role actually works.
AI features in the final designs, and AI-assisted methods in the design process. On the Developer home, an AI Assistance command bar with contextual suggested prompts was designed as a first-class entry point, enabling developers to navigate, create, and act through natural language rather than module navigation. On the Admin home, a proactive AI Insight panel surfaces platform-level observations (such as flagging redundant workflow triggers driving excess executions) without requiring the Admin to go looking. During the design process, AI tools were used to simulate user scenarios across both roles and stress-test interaction models, compressing exploratory research into a structured validation framework before layout decisions were finalised.
Both surfaces maintain Workhall’s existing navigation hierarchy and introduce modular, role-scoped home page components. The Developer home uses a personal productivity component set: recency grids, favorites rail, node panels, and AI command interface. The Admin home uses a platform oversight component set: health metric tiles, trend charts, insight banners, alert panels, access management tables, and admin quick-action surfaces. The two sets share foundational design language while expressing distinct information architectures suited to each role’s scope.
What changed
Results
The redesign transforms Developer Mode from a single passive listing screen into two role-calibrated productivity hubs. Developers now land on a personalised surface that immediately surfaces their recent work, pinned assets, and an AI Assistance interface, collapsing what previously required navigating multiple modules into a single, context-aware starting point. Admins land on a platform command center that gives them live system health, workflow performance insights, user management access, proactive AI-generated observations, and admin-scoped quick actions, all before touching the left nav. The direction was adopted into the 2026 product roadmap following internal stakeholder review. Workhall serves enterprise development teams across multiple organisations, making role-blind navigation friction a meaningful business problem worth solving at scale.
Learnings
The key design tradeoff was deciding where the Developer and Admin experiences should share components versus diverge. Designing for too much commonality would have produced a watered-down Admin surface; too much divergence would have fragmented the product's visual language. The constraint of working within Workhall's existing navigation shell sharpened focus on surface-level role differentiation rather than structural redesign, and that constraint turned out to be productive. The unexpected finding was how much a single 'resume work' surface changes the perceived intelligence of a product: users feel like the system knows them, even when the underlying change is simply surfacing recency data that already existed in the platform.
Next steps
Future iterations could introduce deeper role-based personalisation, intelligent workflow recommendations tailored to each user type, richer activity insights for Admins, and AI-driven suggestions calibrated to Developer vs. Admin intent. These enhancements would further evolve both home pages into fully adaptive, role-aware workspaces.
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