IBM Cloud Pak for Automation
2020
The product(s): IBM Cloud Pak for Automation is made up of various products and capabilities that help users build services that help them automate tasks and processes.
My mission: Worked to improve content consistency across the different products, increase collaboration between design and information development (ID), and support teams with the most “content need.” I lead multiple initiatives to help improve the content experiences across the Pak, here are just a few of the things I’ve been up to.
Aria (2020)
Project Aria is the code name for the end-to-end experience for Cloud Pak for Automation’s Document Processing capabilities. Through the Aria experience, a business user is able to build and train machine learning models that can classify and extract specific data from various documents. They can then build a user interface (or application) to run that service and help their teams automate the document classification and extraction process, which is generally very time consuming. For four months, I primarily supported the design team with UX writing and content strategy.
The problem: Through user research we found that our business users had limited knowledge of machine learning and often felt overwhelmed with the process of training a model.
The solution: I worked closely with our information developer and design researcher to identify opportunities to provide additional instructions or links to contextual support throughout the Aria experience. I also used WalkMe to create and publish a welcome tour for new users.
Workplace (2020)
Workplace is a tool that helps business users and managers track tasks and activities related to various automated workstreams and workflows. This experience will be released in 4Q 2020. I spent about 15% of my time supporting this team as a content designer. I primarily supported terminology efforts, user testing, and content tracking.
Terminology
The problem: Workplace serves as a task-management platform for three capabilities under the Workflow umbrella (Case, Process and Workstreams). To bring these capabilities together, we needed to not only align around terminology but also discover how the terms related to one another.
The solution: Drawing from the concepts of object-oriented UX, I developed an activity to help our teams come together to gather information and align around a shared understanding of each term. We also worked through each term from the perspective of our two primary users (a business user and a manager). Our designers, developers, product managers, and information developer all participated in this activity.
The results: A broader cross-functional understanding of the terminology that’s centered around our users and an easily-accessible artifact that we can all point back to. This exercise ultimately influenced our official glossary and helped design identify which terms to surface to our users.
Content tracking
The problem: When I first starting working with the design team, we discovered that it was really difficult to track content changes between our standard design tools (Sketch and InVision), furthermore it was really difficult for the development teams to know what was the latest content.
The solution: I worked with the information developer on the team to build out content models for each page of the experience. While this can be done in many different ways, we decided to use Box notes because they are easy to collaborate in and don’t require special licensing.
The results: We spent less time tracking down prototypes and more time refining the content that went into the final experience. We also experienced less human-error between the wireframes and the final design.
