Datadog Documentation
Datadog’s documentation supports engineers and operators globally, helping them install agents, integrate services, troubleshoot, and extend the platform through guides, best practices, and API references. I partnered closely with the product design team to analyze pain points and define a clearer, more usable experience, then led the visual design from concept through final delivery.
The result is a documentation experience that is more intuitive, scalable, and aligned with the Datadog brand.
Search functionality
Role
Product Designer
Contribution
User experience, Information architecture, Documentation systems design, Interaction design, Visual design, Cross-functional collaboration
Documentation page final design
Hover interaction for category buttons
The Challenge
Transforming a fragmented docs experience into a developer-first navigation model
The Strategy
Design for information clarity, search efficiency, and user control
At the core of the redesign strategy were a few key principles:
User-Driven Information Architecture
Engineers don’t browse, they search. Prioritize scalable navigation structures and predictive search so users don’t have to guess where content lives.
Contextual Guidance Over Static Lists
Group and label content based on developer intent (e.g., “Getting Started,” “API Reference,” “Guides,” “Integrations”) rather than product module alone, enabling mental models that mirror real workflows.
Documentation page wireframe
The Solution
A redesigned documentation hub built for clarity, scale, and ease of use
The documentation experience was restructured to make information easier to find, understand, and navigate across a rapidly growing content ecosystem.
Key improvements included:
Clear, scalable navigation organized around user intent (Getting Started, Guides, API Reference, Integrations), reducing guesswork and improving search ability
Elevated search with autocomplete, keyword matching, and previews, enabling faster discovery than browsing alone
The Impact
Turning qualitative signals into a clear product win
The redesign generated strong qualitative feedback from both users and internal teams.
Engineers consistently shared that the new documentation was easier to navigate and significantly faster to use, particularly when finding API references and setup guidance.
Internal teams reported a noticeable decrease in documentation-related complaints, signaling that users were more successfully self-serving answers and relying less on manual guidance.
As Datadog rapidly expanded, the documentation became dense, inconsistent, and difficult to navigate, especially for engineers looking for specific API references or setup guidance. Content grew faster than the system supporting it, leaving users without clear paths to answers.
The challenge was to create a documentation experience that felt as cohesive, searchable, and reliable as the product itself, helping developers find the right information quickly, whether they were getting started or debugging complex systems.
Previous version of Docs page
Search as the Primary Interaction Surface
Surface results with context and preview snippets, helping users identify the right content before clicking, a must when flipping between API specs, examples, and conceptual docs.
These strategic choices focused on reducing cognitive load, increasing findability, and empowering developers to complete tasks quickly and confidently.
Consistent content patterns across tutorials, references, and guides to create a more predictable reading experience
UI and hierarchy refinements (sticky navigation, clearer sectioning, improved readability) to support long-form technical content
Visual cues and affordances to help users orient themselves within dense documentation
Together, these changes transformed the docs from a fragmented content repository into a developer-centric system designed to scale with the product and its audience.
Beyond immediate usability improvements, the project established a scalable documentation foundation with patterns and navigation designed to support future product and content growth without sacrificing clarity.
Heatmap of user activity on the redesigned site