Back
Case Study
API Portal
A self-serve developer portal where Schneider Electric's internal teams and external partners browse products, discover APIs, and manage their integrations in one place.
Overview
Schneider Electric's product and API ecosystem — circuit breakers, lighting control, panel boards, sensors, power monitoring — was hard to discover and even harder to integrate against. I designed the SE API Manager: a "Life Is On" branded developer portal where internal teams and external distributors sign in through separate SSO and Partner Login flows, browse a filterable product catalog, find and test APIs from a searchable catalogue, and manage their registered applications in one dashboard.
Role
UX/UI Design
Client
Schneider Electric
Industry
Energy Tech
Timeline
2024
00
Before — SharePoint (mockup)
After — DAMS portal
01
The problem
Schneider Electric’s product lines span circuit breakers, lighting control, panel boards, valves, sensors, and power monitoring hardware, each with its own APIs for order status, stock levels, rebates, and digital assets. Distributors and internal teams building against this data had no single place to find it — and no consistent way to prove they were even talking to the right audience, since internal Schneider employees and external distributor partners needed fundamentally different access paths into the same system.
The brief was to give both audiences one portal without collapsing them into one experience: internal staff need direct SSO access to build and monitor; distributor partners need a separate, more guarded Partner Login, since they’re consuming Schneider’s APIs from outside the company rather than building them.
02
The solution
The portal opens on a single sign-in screen with two clearly separated paths — Sign in with SSO for internal teams, Partner Login for external distributors — so the entry point itself sets expectations about what each audience can do next. From there, a Products catalog lets anyone filter Schneider’s hardware lines by Value Chain (Procurement, Fulfilment, CRM, Operations, and more) to find the right product family before diving into its APIs.
The API Catalogue is the working core: every API — Distributor-SPJ-Rebate, Order Status, Product Stocklevel Checker, Product Digital Assets — is filterable by product, business type, and publisher, and each one opens into a detail page with a full reference (Overview, Paths, Components, Schemas), plus Try It Now and Subscribe actions so a developer can test and request access without leaving the page. A companion Applications dashboard lets each partner see every app they’ve registered against the platform in one grid, instead of losing track of credentials across email threads.
03
Impact & learnings
The homepage surfaces Top 5 Performing and Top 5 Subscribed API lists pulled directly from usage, alongside a Generate Reports shortcut for trend analysis — turning the landing page into a live signal of what the ecosystem actually runs on, not just a static directory. A dedicated Knowledge Base pairs every major API with a plain-language how-to guide, so the reference docs on the detail pages aren’t the only way in.
The clearest lesson was that “self-serve for everyone” still needs a front door that discriminates: separating SSO and Partner Login by intent, not just by form field, made every downstream screen easier to design, because the portal never had to guess who it was talking to.