CI/CD Platform
Role
Lead designer
Contributions
Product Design
Duration
2017 — 2019
Employer
Yahoo
Overview
CI/CD pipelines are supposed to make life easier—automate the grunt work, keep things humming, and let engineers sleep a little better at night. But when I first sat down with the Screwdriver interface, it felt more like playing 4D chess than running a build.
As part of a small design team embedded in Yahoo’s Central Tech org, I helped lead the overhaul of Screwdriver’s UX. Our mission? Rethink the platform from a user’s perspective—especially the developers juggling multiple pipelines, debugging broken builds at 2 a.m., or just trying to figure out what went wrong and when.
We leaned hard into user research, iterated like mad, and made some gutsy calls around layout, visualization, and navigation. The result? A sleeker, saner, and way more human way to ship code.
Collections Page
Jobs Detail Page
Challenge
Here’s the thing: Screwdriver had power. Tons of it. But it was buried under layers of UI that felt more like legacy software than a modern, cloud-native experience.
Pipelines were linear and cramped
Error paths were hard to trace, especially across multiple jobs
Navigation was clunky, and context switching? Brutal
For new users, just figuring out where to start could feel like decoding ancient runes
And that wasn’t just our opinion. We sat with users across the org—some veterans, some rookies—and heard the same pain points on repeat. It wasn’t that the tool didn’t work. It just didn’t communicate well.
You could feel the tension: smart people wasting time navigating a smart tool that didn’t feel smart enough.
Solution
We didn’t just slap on a fresh coat of paint—we gutted the whole thing and rebuilt it from the ground up with usability front and center.
Here’s how we tackled it:
Switched from a linear to a 2D grid view for pipeline visualization. Suddenly, complex job relationships were visible at a glance instead of buried in scrolls and indents.
Introduced dynamic tooltips and inline errors so users didn’t have to dig through logs just to figure out what broke.
Created a contextual sidebar that changed based on job state, showing relevant logs, metadata, and controls without pulling users away from the main view.
Simplified the nav structure by organizing around user tasks, not just technical architecture. (Crazy idea, right?)
And we prototyped everything. We ran clickable flows through real engineers, gathered feedback weekly, and kept polishing until things just felt… right.
Honestly, the 2D pipeline shift was a game changer. Visual complexity didn’t vanish, but now it had structure. Users could breathe.
Settings Page
Metrics Page
Impact
The change was immediate and measurable—both in metrics and morale.
Migration speed doubled. Teams were moving over to Screwdriver faster than before—fewer training sessions, less hand-holding, more confidence.
Support tickets dropped by 40% within the first two quarters after launch. That’s a lot of hours we got back.
DAUs jumped 60% in some teams, especially new adopters who’d previously bounced off the old UI.
The visual overhaul also opened the door for faster iteration, thanks to modular components and design patterns that didn’t fight the engineers implementing them.
But more than numbers, the vibe changed. We heard things like, “This finally feels like it was made for me.” And that? That’s the kind of feedback you chase.
Sometimes good design is quiet. This wasn’t one of those times—and that’s exactly what Screwdriver needed.