Buzz Usborne
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Buildkite

Summary

Buildkite is a tool used by the world’s biggest software teams like Uber, Airbnb and Canva to securely test and deploy their code. I’ve been Principal Designer for a little over a year, during which time I’ve been helping the business build human-friendly solutions to some tough technical problems.

Evolving a UI Direct link

My first year at Buildkite has seen some big releases, small (but mighty) improvements and a shift away from code presentation and toward empowering the humans behind the code. One of the ways to add humanity has been through creating a more fun, colourful, inclusive and accessible tone throughout the products.

I’m particularly proud of how I’ve taken a data-heavy and technical bias product and evolved the style through 1% iterations, rather than a total overhaul. Thank goodness for emoji   🦀 🦄 ✨


Go big… Direct link

I’ve also commited significant effort to building the tools and processes and visual strategies to help us create a best-in-class product that scales. I wrote about my 1st year here. I've created new features, overhauled old ones, and re-modelled the architecture to support our future plans — including creating our design system, BKUI.

Above/ Some features are so technically complicated, they call for functional prototypes to stress-test the UX and UI. This is one of those cases, where I coded an interactive demo to experiment how a user could select and expand objects, which themselves could contain an infinite number of items of varying lengths and colours.