Application page for NexusClaims with a Branches tab listing main, develop, feature, bugfix and hotfix branches, and a right panel showing main’s current release, details, dependencies and the branches created from it.

Improved Wayfinding in the Developer Workflow

Product Design | 2025

Branch and merge had just shipped on Unqork as an MVP, and internal developers were starting to build it into their daily work. I picked it up with a backlog of new features ready to go. Before I designed anything, I had to figure out where I was in the product. That turned out to be the whole project.

Diagram of a main branch at v0.0 splitting into two feature branches, feature/blue-hat and feature/sunglasses, which merge back into main at v0.5

Inspired by https://coderefinery.github.io/git-intro/branches/

The concept of “Branch & Merge” is a well known practice in software development. It’s the process of making a copy of code to safely experiment on, and merging it back into the original codebase once changes are ready, making it safe to collaborate with other developers on the same project.


Screenshot of the MVP’s Branch & Version Management panel open over the app, annotated with thought bubbles reading “Why is [branch] shown 3 times?”, “Am I in the branch or the application?” and “Lots of primary CTAs.”

From my audit: the questions I kept asking as a non-developer.

I onboarded by auditing the MVP and annotating everywhere I got stuck. Each question looked like a small UI fix. Together they pointed at something structural: branches had been added on top of the existing navigation, not built into it.


So I argued for pausing the feature work and rebuilding the hierarchy around branches. Here’s the same app, the same branch and the same data, before and after.




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