IBM Cloud Pak Experiences
IBM | 2019
The problem: IBM customers didn’t know how the IBM Cloud Paks could help them automate their work, manage their data, or modernize their products. Historically, the only way they could get to know the products was through face-to-face meetings with our product sellers or follow arduous step-by-step PDFs. This experience was time-consuming, complex, and costly.
The solution: Work closely with design, marketing, and product management teams to build out guided self-service trial experiences for the IBM Cloud Paks using AppCues.
The content: For this project, I served as the content design lead. I helped develop and review all of the content that went into the actual tours and established a set of content standards for the various product teams to follow. For this project, I had to work through various rounds of editing and review with various stakeholders. It was the ultimate content tightrope: we had to breakdown complex concepts and showcase the real value of the product to our potential buyers in 10 steps or less.
The audience
Potential buyers and users of the IBM Cloud Paks. They care less about how the products work and more about how the products can help their teams work better.
Voice and tone
Given that our audience was fairly broad, we focused on simplifying complex concepts and opted for a friendly and more casual tone than our traditional documentation. We liked to think of the voice and tone as “a really awesome, never annoying tour guide.”
The process
To figure out the content we needed to create we leaned on user research and existing customer data to identify specific pain points or business problems that the Cloud Paks could help solve.
For this project, we held multiple content reviews with various stakeholders. To help our teams gather feedback and collaborate, I had everybody pin the end-to-end flows up on the wall or paste it into a Mural board. This helped everybody see the end-to-end experience and focus less on the design and more on the content.
For this project, I also tracked all of the content using simple content models. Meaning: we pulled all of the content out of our prototypes and put it into a table. This helped prevent version control issues and gave everybody the opportunity to provide feedback.
The outcome: Our team delivered four unique trial experiences across IBM Cloud Pak for Integration, IBM Cloud Pak for Automation and IBM Cloud Pak for Data. The IBM Cloud Pak experience also won a w3 Award in 2019.
