For the first time in its history, Citi was opening its tools up to the outside world. The Developer Hub was the front door — a platform where external developers could understand, test, and integrate Citi's APIs into their own products. It was also a cultural shift the bank hadn't made before, from closed enterprise institution to partner in an open ecosystem. A lot was riding on it.
The audience made it harder. Engineers evaluating API platforms are reflexively skeptical of large financial institutions — and fairly so. Most banks have treated developers as an afterthought. Nothing about the site could read like a bank talking at them. It had to read like a peer.
I led visual design and overall experience, working in close partnership with UX, product, and engineering. The design had to do two things at once: feel approachable, modern, and credible to a technical audience, and do it without abandoning the trust cues that made Citi Citi.
Every major decision came back to the same principle: don't describe the APIs, show what developers could build with them. So we organized the entire experience around end-to-end customer journeys instead of documentation taxonomies — developers landed on real-world scenarios, not reference trees. We built a full sandbox testing environment directly into the site, so anyone evaluating an integration could experiment before committing. And we gave serious real estate to partner success stories, because the fastest way to earn a developer's trust is to show them another developer already shipped on the platform.
The platform launched with roughly 6,700 users signing up almost immediately, and continued adding hundreds of new developers month over month. More importantly, it reset how Citi engaged with the outside developer ecosystem — from closed and enterprise-only to open and partner-driven.
What I took from it: when the audience is technical and the product is abstract, design is the translator. It's the layer that makes complex infrastructure legible — and legibility is what earns the first integration.
