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
I prepared and led five guided self-service sessions with external users. I was supported by a User Researcher in recruiting participants using Usertesting.com. I synthesised data and shared with stakeholders to develop an experience strategy vision for the product.
IBM Kubernetes landing page
1. Research goal
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.
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.
GOAL / 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. Insights to action
Need / To test experiences with users aligned to our product personas. We also wanted to identify key market differentiators, pain points and possible upsells within our new UI experience.
ACTIONS / I prepared and led five guided self-service sessions with external users. I was supported by a User Researcher in recruiting participants using Usertesting.com. I synthesised data and shared with stakeholders to develop an experience strategy vision.
Collaboration / I worked with Product Owner to utilise generative feedback for product roadmap.
Synthesis of user research
3. Heuristic evaluation
methodology / With another designer, I conducted a heuristic evaluation utilising Nielson Norman guidelines on 'as-is' experience. The research was structured using eight common tasks conducted by users. We listed the findings under the categories of usability, content design, visual design and discoverability.
result / 48 heuristic issues found. They were listed and categorised by severity in Github.
Heuristic evaluation of five key user tasks
4. Results
1. As a team, which included technical SMEs and Developer squads, we created a 12 month experience strategy “Vision”. This was to be released in stages.
2. This 'Vision' allowed for data-driven design improvements to be made using direct internal and external feedback, customer metrics from Amplitude and NPS score.
3. All Sev1 design issues in Github were closed by team within 12 months, with 90% closure of rest of issues by year end.
Updated Kubernetes experience (2023) after 12 month 'Vision'
Cover image by Dylan Dotolo, IBM Visual Designer
