Case Study
How mapping the journey of multi-cloud users aligned teams across IBM to streamline the content journey across public and private cloud.
Challenge
Align 9 siloed organizations to deliver a unified content experience for hybrid cloud users.
Customers searching hybrid (public/private) cloud services cannot understand the landscape of IBM Cloud offerings.
- Marketing pages serve as the entry point for new customers and current customers looking to expand hybrid cloud services.
- Documentation is the most influential factor for the users of services when evaluating options on the market.
- Separate portals for public/private cloud.
- Docs scattered across IBM Cloud Docs and two legacy knowledge centers.
- Executive priority: introduce "Cloud Pak" content and docs for a recently acquired hybrid cloud solution.
Actions
Over 1 quarter, I conducted research and facilitated collaboration across the company by grounding activities and discussions with research insights.
- User interviews to understand cloud users' mental model for services.
- Card sort and ranking survey to prioritize content types for different user archetypes.
- Competitor review to understand the cloud market.
- Workshop to align all workstreams.
- RITE method to revise new navigation and information architecture.
- Findability benchmarking study to assess impact of new navigation.
Results
Coordinated workstreams to deliver IBM’s first unified cloud content experience.
- Launched a global navigation system that bridged marketing and documentation
- Created hubs for APIs, tutorials, and learning content for all things cloud
- Measureable UX gains:
- +17% task completion rate
- +16.8 point increase to SUS (System Usability Scale) score
Process
Details on the actions that led to results:
Interviews to understand how our customers think of and search for cloud services.
What are they searching for when exploring new technology? Do they seek out content specific to public and/or private cloud? What content types are they looking for?
Users primarily look for documentation when they are learning something new or when something goes wrong. Customers are leveraging hybrid cloud solutions and dividing content between public and private cloud leads to redundancy and confusion.
FAQs are easy to scan and can quickly communicate an offering's capabilities.
Diagrams are quick to consume.
Code snippets help demonstrate and can be copied easily.
Providing screenshots within the text eases scanning.
Survey to determine which content types users are interested in based on where they are in their journey.
120+ responses were segmented by task frequency. Marketing pages target 'Explorers', documentation and knowledge centers serve 'Builders'.
- 'Explorers' ranked content types based on what's most important to them when they are exploring and evaluating new tech.
- 'Builders' ranked content types based on what's most important to them while they are building and maintaining cloud services.
- ‘Builders’ ranked system requirements by importance and tutorial content by level of interest.
Results influenced the IA and content hierarchy for marketing and docs.
Competitor review to see how direct competitors are organizing their cloud content.
- 3 direct competitors (enterprise cloud solutions)
- 1 indirect competitor (smaller platform, popular with devs)
All competitors have a single cloud landing page that points users towards their documentation, all with the same look and feel. Users can search across all docs from this cloud entry point.
Workshop to align around how we will address user pain points.
- 29 people from 9 different squads
- Each squad presented a user journey for discovering IBM Cloud services through getting started
- All took notes that were grouped to identify actions for roadmaps
IBM Cloud Doc roadmap actions:
Complete tutorials, landing pages for offering subcollections, and provide image guidance for content contributors.
Cross-org roadmap actions:
Improve product pages and navigation through all ibm.com/cloud content.
Applying the RITE method to revise designs quickly based on user feedback.
Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation allows for usability improvements to be made as soon as they are raised by research participants and validated in the following user sessions.
- 6 iterations in 2 days
- Tasks: finding and navigating a tutorial in the IBM Cloud Docs redesign
- Using mid-fi prototypes for quick design iteration
Improvements shipped!
New IA
New IBM Cloud Docs homepage
New subcollections landing pages
Tutorials hub
API & SDK hub
Findability benchmarking study to measure impact of our work.
- 2 rounds to measure impact of changes
- Same 10 participants (1:1 IBM users, users of competitors)
- 50-minute moderated sessions evaluating 9 findability tasks aligned to KPIs
Reported improvements across usability metrics contextualized with qualitative participant feedback and added newly discovered issues to the backlog.
17% increase in task completion rate
Overall time on task decreased by 7 seconds
Increased confidence rating and ease-of-use rating
+16.8 point increase to SUS (System Usability Scale) score
Improvements
All API & SDK references located in one place improved discoverability.
Participants were now able to navigate between marketing pages and Docs.
Issues
Need more visible entry points to the FAQ library. *We also monitored analytics and observed a drop in traffic.
Reflection
Project takeaways
Why I'm sharing this work
Led cross-functional partners from different organizations across the company.
This was a known user and business issue, but no one had been able to bring all parties together to solve it.
What worked well
Socializing our work often (slack blasts, weekly org-wide playbacks, etc.) gained the trust of influential stakeholders leading to wider support.
Sharing templates to communicate the user journey helped collaborators document and communicate their users’ story.
Quantifying the impact of the redesign.
What I would do differently
Compare results from the content type survey with behavioral analytics.
Invest more time looking at competitors (run a UX competitive analysis or benchmarking study).
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