IBM Cloud Pak Experiences

Problem

Despite IBM’s company wide push to unify the 100s software products into containerized platforms, there still was not an easy way for prospective clients to experience the product first hand. Traditionally, a prospective client would have to sign up for a demo that required the client to install the product onto a temporary IBM provided virtual machine. Clients told us, the installation instructions and process, were too complicated and thus the often failed to experience first use without assistance. The complexity created a barrier to understanding the value of our products for our many existing and prospective.

To address business problem of increasing the volume of people going through our demos and learning about our products, our goal was to create a self service demo that gave the clients access to the full products without requiring them to install the product themselves. Once the client had access to the product, the demo would walk them through the product to show off its value to them quickly and efficiently.

Solution

For our solution there are two main components to the experience that we delivered. The first component was the Cloud Pak Experiences Welcome Page where the user selects which product and specifically which parts of the product they want to explore. It is a small webapp that the Front End Developers on my built to launch users into on cloud instances of the products such as Cloud Pak for Data. I am the only Design Lead that I know of at IBM who lead a team directly responsible for creating and delivering production quality code and experiences. I learned a lot about the application architecture and what it takes ensure things like the correct Kubernetes cluster getting spun up.

The second main component is the in product demos that we built using 3rd party Digital Adoption Platforms (Appcues and WalkMe). The key here was to tell a compelling story to hook the users into considering our products. Our team designed the demo walk throughs and we also built/maintained them. If a client experienced a service outage it was often me that would diagnose and trouble shoot the problem for them because we had no DevOps team capable of doing so.

Process

Throughout this process the design team was the central team driving this project. Not only were we the team that built/maintained the welcome page but we were also the team that built the demos in the Digital Adoption Platforms (DAP). This added a lot complexity that a normal design team could rely on other teams (Dev, QA, etc.) for. Before we could worry about the building/maintaining aspects we had a bigger problem, a lack of domain knowledge.

For us to tell compelling stories to customers in these disparate domains we needed to know what mattered to them. Rather than doing the research ourselves we relied upon the teams making the products and their research to help guide us. We leaned on the knowledge of Offering Management, Sales, Marketing, Design, Development, and research. Not all of those roles a were great story tellers so it took a lot of work to mold things into cohesive and compelling stories on these complex products (See us making sense of a flow on the left).

After we got the stories worked out our biggest problem was the technical implementation of the flows. We would often run into situations where the products were developed in ways that didn’t work well with the DAPs and thus we would have to change the stories. We were also the only team dedicated to the project we also shouldered the main burden of any bug fixes in testing or production. With those two factors I had to run the team like a Dev team and adopt thing like agile, scrum, sprints, and github for our design team.

Impact

With flows built out for 3 Cloud Paks our project was helped drive tens of millions of dollars in sales towards the Cloud Paks which have been IBMs main focus over the last year plus.

The Project also won a Silver Award in the 14th Annual W3 Awards for the Visual Appeal and Website Experience.

This success has also led to our teams next project of creating standards for our organizations 200+ products based on what we learned here.