ux
visual
systems
digital/physical
Building a public-facing API portal from scratch for the largest credit union in the US.
NFCU needed to take a platform that only existed behind a VPN and open it to the world, without sacrificing the structure and clarity that developers depend on to do their jobs.
team & timeline
background & challenge
A portal locked behind a VPN, with no visual design and no external access.
Navy Federal Credit Union had an API portal that was disorganized, visually undesigned, and limited to internal users only. The opportunity was clear: build a public-facing developer platform where both internal teams and external fintech partners could discover, subscribe to, and consume NFCU APIs without friction.
There was no visual system to build on, no IA to reference, and no existing external-facing product to benchmark against. I owned the project end-to-end, from research and persona definition through wireframes, high-fidelity design, and creative QA.
approach
Discovery, documentation, and access.
I started with a benchmarking sprint across banking API portals and best-in-class developer documentation, including Capital One and Barclays, to identify patterns worth borrowing.
I defined three distinct personas covering internal developers, external fintech partners, and open banking users, and mapped their journeys end-to-end to understand where discovery, documentation, and onboarding broke down.
The core design challenge was building one coherent system that served fundamentally different users without watering down the experience for either. That tension shaped every IA and component decision, from how APIs were surfaced in the catalog to how access levels were structured across My Workspace, Community, and Support.
impact
Live at developer.navyfederal.org
The portal launched publicly with 8 open banking APIs and 16+ internal APIs surfaced through a single unified catalog, structured across two access tiers for internal and external users.
Designing for developers who have zero patience for ambiguity, without direct access to those same developers, meant every decision had to be deliberate and well-reasoned. The architecture was built to hold even if some assumptions turned out to be slightly off.