Redesigning the developer console for Pley. Game developers would not learn another SaaS tool, so I made the console read like documentation they progress through. Onboarding a game went from seven months to two.

The problem. Pley made any Unity game playable in the browser. The buyer was the publisher, but the users were game developers, usually at a different company, with no appetite for learning a new SaaS tool. A signed contract was worthless without them. Onboarding a new game meant a new publisher, several studios, sometimes a UA partner, and getting all of them to act. I worked on this with our PM, me leading the design and onboarding, since I also ran support for customers getting started on our stack.

That support seat is where the insight came from. I watched what developers actually did with the old console. They visited once and did not return. They used the SDK to push builds, then someone else had to publish, often us, after chasing the right person through Slack and email. They were treating the console as a foreign tool bolted onto their workflow, something like a tag manager, not a place to work. The capability was never the problem. The format was.

What I built. Mobile developers live in platform documentation and follow steps linearly. Web was foreign territory to most of them. So instead of a tool they had to learn, I designed the console to read like documentation they progress through. We prototyped the onboarding as a checklist in Notion, then built it into the console itself, interactive. Account linking, loading videos, conversion API integration, CI for pushing builds, release management, each capability sat next to the explanation of how it worked and the exact action to take, the keys to copy, the field to fill, the button to enable. Right information at the right time instead of all the documentation up front.

The point is the reframe. We did not add capability. We changed how the console was perceived, from software to learn into steps to follow, and that moved developers toward the self-serve behavior the company needed. This was a new direction beating a broken baseline, not a finished system.

The outcome. The baseline was broken in a measurable way. Onboarding a studio and getting a game live had taken around seven months. The first game onboarded through the checklist went live in two. The coordination also moved into the tool. People could assign and complete actions where the work happened, which ended the constant chasing of contacts who were not even in our Slack. A signed contract started turning into a live game without us carrying every handoff by hand.