Domain Management

Pantheon's Early Access Decoupled site product had no self-serve domain connection. Customers submitted a form, waited for a support team member to assist, and only then had traffic routed to their domain. On a platform where the mature CMS product already had self-serve domain management, this gap was a significant regression in experience.

The goal was to close that gap — building a unified domain management experience that worked across both products and met the market release of the Decoupled feature.

I conducted customer interviews and usability sessions with developers to understand how domain connection fit into their actual workflow and where the current process broke down.

With my product partner I mapped the user story and defined the must-have use cases: launching a new site with a new domain, debugging domain status, adding additional domains and setting routing, and transferring a domain to an existing site.

Disclose information only when necessary. The original concept used a stepper that surfaced all steps upfront, with a loading area representing the DNS propagation wait. This gave users an accurate picture but introduced unnecessary complexity at the start of the flow.

Strengthen security guardrails. Iteration two introduced a stepper scoped to the verification step only, removing the option to skip verification entirely. With 70% of sites migrating into the product, skipping verification created a real risk of traffic hijacking. Removing the skip option served the majority of use cases and reduced security exposure.

Status indicators and email notifications are part of the design. The workflow spans multiple sessions — a developer initiates connection, hands off DNS changes to IT, then waits for propagation. Clear status states and email notifications were designed as core parts of the flow, not afterthoughts, so users always knew whether the next action was theirs or the system's.