Commonwealth Bank
CommBank’s Payments-as-a-Service lets companies add payment features to their apps without building from scratch. I designed the developer experience for intuitive API integration, helping teams adopt APIs quickly and confidently.
Product Design
Project Overview
Client: Commonwealth Bank
Industry: Fintech, SaaS, APIs
Timeline: 12 weeks (2025)
My Role: Product Designer, Ideation Lead
Problem/Context
Developers faced friction integrating APIs due to complexity, unclear documentation, and lack of self-service tools. CommBank aimed to build a developer-first experience to:
Lower technical barriers for integration
Compete with platforms like Stripe, Twilio, and Snowflake
Build trust and adoption through clarity and transparency
HMW build a developer experience that empowers self-service, lowers complexity, and builds trust through clarity?
Research/Insights
Methods:
Competitive Analysis: Benchmarked Adyen, Plaid, Snowflake, Stripe, Twilio
User Interviews: 10 engineers from enterprises (Google, IBM, Oracle)
Synthesis: Affinity mapping, buyer personas, buyer journeys
Key Insights:
Self-sufficient documentation drives adoption
External integration experience should be smooth
Clear hand-offs prevent frustration
Flexibility across use cases is essential
Security must be prioritized
Developer dependency grows with clarity and trust
Ideation / Design Strategy
Crazy 8’s: Rapid sketching of diverse ideas
FigJam consolidation: Centralized feature concepts
Key Features: Personalized onboarding, API playground, learner’s hub, notifications dashboard, security hub, collaborative workspace
Prioritization: 2x2 Impact vs Effort matrix
Prototype
Personalized Onboarding: a short questionnaire powers an adaptive guide that meets users where they are to achieve their API goals
Learning Hub: a unified dashboard that offers tutorials/guides, explains what an API does, and how to integrate it
Interactive Testing: an embedded and interactive sandbox where developers can experiment, debug, and edit code safely
Impact / Risks
Impact:
Revenue Growth: Lower barriers to integration enable new API subscriptions and transaction revenue
Competitive Positioning: Developer-first approach differentiates CommBank vs fintechs and other banks
Operational Efficiency: Self-service portal reduces support workload, enabling scale
Risk & Mitigations:
Risks | Mitigations |
|---|---|
Personalization may feel too long or intrusive | Progressive profiling; A/B test onboarding flows |
Playground may misrepresent API behavior | Match API endpoints in test mode; clarify differences |
Learner Hub may miss developer needs | Collect feedback, monitor tickets, update content regularly |
Learnings / Reflections
Designing for highly technical users requires balancing detail with simplicity
Personalization must enhance, not hinder, adoption
Sprint collaboration across research, synthesis, ideation, and prototyping strengthened cross-functional teamwork