Company / IBM
Role / Designer working with a UX researcher and 1 product manager
Tools / Mural, UserTesting.com, Amplitude, Github, Slack, Box, WebEx
Timeline / 3 months
Cover image by Dylan Dotolo, IBM Visual Designer
IBM Kubernetes landing page
1. OVERVIEW
Users / Infrastructure Builders, Infrastructure Administrators and Cloud Engineers. These personas utilise IBM Kubernetes Service to build, manage and upgrade their clusters as part of a managed service.
OBJECTIVE / We wanted to understand our customer needs and pain points, and identify factors that can help the IBM Kubernetes be easier to consume and sell.
GOALs / Develop an experience strategy vision through research.
Competitive landscape / GCP Kubernetes clusters, AWS EKS.
Managing multiple clusters
Cluster overview page
Managing worker nodes
Linking to Kubernetes console
2. HEURISTIC EVALUATION
methodology / Team conducted heuristic evaluation utilising Nielson Norman guidelines.
result / 48 heuristic issues found. They were listed and categorised by severity in Github.
Heuristic evaluation of five key user tasks
3. USER RESEARCH
Need / To test improved experiences with users that align with our product personas. We also wanted to identify key market differentiators, pain points and possible upsells within new UI.
ACTIONS / I prepared and led 5 guided self-service sessions with external users. Recruitment was via UserTesting.com, and was supported by a User Researcher. I synthesised data and shared with stakeholder to develop an experience strategy vision.
Collaboration / Worked with Product Owner to utilise generative feedback for product roadmap.
Synthesis of user research
4. RESULTS
1. As a team, we worked with technical SMEs and Developer squads, we created a 12 month experience strategy “Vision”, to be released in stages.
2. Data-driven decisions were made using direct internal and external feedback, customer metrics from Amplitude and NPS score.
3. All Github design issues marked as Sev1 closed by team within 12 months, with 90% closure of rest of issues by year end.
Updated Kubernetes experience (2023) after 12 month 'Vision'