6.1 introduces an innovative, high-productivity portal for application designers known as the Designer Studio. Through refactoring based on customer feedback, the Designer Studio provides quick access to dozens of tools and wizards. See the Designer Studio Overview and Navigating in the 6.1 Designer Studio: Help for 5.5 developers.

Note these specific Designer Studio capabilities:

• Enhanced Search — Full-text search is enhanced to retrieve matching rules, data instances and help topics. You can search for keys of rules, or data keys, or search through all values in the entire object. Search may be restricted to rules in the current application.
• Pega button navigation — The prominent Pega button () menu provides quick access to 50+gadgets grouped into landing pages. Each gadget provides information; most allow easier configuration of specific capabilities in your system or your application.
• Tab bar — Each open rule or data form, landing page, in-progress wizard, or work object is represented by a labeled tab. Tabs provide quick access to all open objects.
• Browser support — Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 is a supported browser for both application designers and users (in addition to version 7).

• What's Happening display — Designers working on an application, even when physically distributed, can monitor each other's work and progress in near-real-time, through a streaming display.
• Application-oriented development — Many landing pages and certain wizards provide holistic reporting and management at the application level, as opposed to the more granular RuleSet or RuleSet Version level. See Designer Studio landing page gadgets provide application-wide perspectives