Process Orchestration
UI & UX Design | Design Lead
Camunda
Bridging business and developer workflows through collaboration-ready process design at scale.
The goal of this project was to evolve Camunda's BPMN modeler into a tool where business users and developers could actually work on the same process together.
Camunda's BPMN modeler is a tool for designing and automating business processes. As workflows grow more complex and now extend into agentic AI scenarios, two very different types of people need to work on the same process: the business user who defines what the process should do, and the developer who builds the executable version of it.
These two personas were effectively working in parallel, not together. Business users would define processes in specs, sometimes inside Camunda and sometimes in external documents entirely. Developers then had to interpret those specs and translate them into something technically executable, with rounds of back and forth that happened mostly outside the tool through emails, meetings and comments. Camunda was being used to run processes but not to build shared understanding of them.
I led UX efforts to close that gap without building an entirely separate collaboration tool. The key insight was that business users did not need their own space. They needed a version of the existing model with lower complexity and a clearer entry point. That shaped every decision that followed.
I worked in triad with product and engineering to prioritise features against both company goals and real user needs, ran regular research with customers to stay grounded in actual pain points, ran A/B experiments to validate directions before committing, and took work from early concepts through to detailed specs for engineering. I also worked out a longer term vision for what bringing business and developer closer together could look like across the product.
The canvas became significantly clearer, with improved visual hierarchy and interaction patterns that both personas could navigate confidently. Tooltips and contextual guidance were added across elements to help business users understand what they were looking at. A simplified interface reduced the entry barrier by hiding technical detail that was only relevant to developers. Process templates gave business users an easier starting point. A clearer handoff pattern was introduced between business and dev. And AI powered process generation was integrated into the modeler, further reducing the effort needed to go from idea to working process.