Qualcomm designs and manufactures semiconductors, software, and wireless technology services. As developers became the primary decision-makers in AI and IoT adoption, Qualcomm partnered with Code and Theory to transform their marketing-first website into a developer-first platform without losing their existing audience.
Creating an experience for developers
As Lead UX Designer on Code and Theory's UX team, I owned end-to-end design across the developer experience, from product hubs and comparison tools to AI-powered search and the design system. This included:
Qualcomm.com | Developer Experience - created dedicated product and application hubs, and search features and tools that helped developers find needed content based on their searching mindset.
Developer Workspace - feature that enables project creation and asset management.
Intelligent Search - an AI generative conversational tool that provides answers and relevant content, such as product cards and code snippets, in response to developer queries, enhancing user engagement and support.
View Live Project
Details
2023 - 2024
Code and Theory
Role
Concepting
User Experience
Interaction Design
Prototyping
Design System Management
Functional Annotations
The Challenge
Qualcomm.com was built for enterprise buyers, not the developers who needed specs, tools, and code to build. IoT at Qualcomm operated across disconnected silos, with content schemas that were inconsistent between sales and support. Developers were becoming the primary decision-makers in AI and IoT adoption, and Qualcomm needed to earn their trust.
UX Phase
Before designing, we analyzed existing developer research and validated key behaviors through low-fidelity prototype testing. We found that developers wanted technical depth over marketing copy, that comparison was a core workflow, and that AI tools and resources existed on the site but were nearly impossible to find. From there, I led the design of wireframes, interaction explorations, and prototypes across three key features: the Developer Workspace, Product Comparison Table, and Intelligent Search.
Visual Design
Working within Qualcomm's brand guidelines, I led the build-out of a comprehensive component library: 75+ new components designed, documented, and scaled across desktop and mobile breakpoints, with annotated specs and behavior notes structured for engineering handoff. In total, the work produced over 250 new modules and 1,000 assets.
Developer Experience
Developers aren’t shopping for a single product in isolation. They need to know about interoperability between products, the relationship between software and hardware and the roadmap for product optimizations, upgrades and integrations. Instead of stand-alone product pages, we designed consolidated hubs of information that match this mental model, allowing easy in-page access to all associated content surrounding an individual product. This streamlined the evaluation experience for developers and proved to them that Qualcomm understands their creative engineering process.
Developer Workspace
The Developer Workspace is a persistent content browsing toolkit that sits on top of the product information, documentation, forums, and other content that makes up the Developer Experience.
Quality content is the current hallmark for a best-in-class developer experience that competitors are reaching for, but no one had solved for what comes next. We capitalized on Qualcomm’s opportunity to define a new approach for interacting and enhancing how technical documentation is found and consumed.
Intelligent Search
More than any other group, developers are acutely aware of the role that AI can play in streamlining nearly any professional process. We had to deliver on the expectation that AI would play a role in their journey.
We designed a conversational search experience that allowed developers to ask technical questions in natural language and receive generative answers in tandem with supporting documentation and other recommendations. This combination of text response, links and files was designed to be an elevated search experience, not just a run-of-the-mill chat.
Outcome
The redesign drove measurable results: developer visits increased by 540%, visits resulting in software downloads increased by 425%, and engaged users, measured by depth of interaction with product content, increased by 228%. The platform set a new benchmark for developer-first experiences in the AI and IoT space.
More work
