Content Experience
IBM Support
—
Design Strategy Lead
2020 – 2021

Technical content plays a critical role in enabling users to troubleshoot, learn, and effectively use their products. In 2020, IBM saw a steep increase in support tickets related to technical content and our team was tasked with finding out why.

We soon found that users struggled to find content critical to their job, were bombarded by irrelevant information, and felt alone when they couldn’t access the information they needed. This lead to an influx of open support tickets which drove up cost and hindered support engineers from solving business-critical cases.

My Role

I facilitated a series of workshops to better understand stakeholder perspectives, the scope of the problem, and assumed client frustrations.

I worked closely with research to craft new methods of testing, (in)validate user pain points, and socialize our findings.

Because this was the first major research project our stakeholders experienced, I evangelized the value of the user’s voice, provided reassurance when insights didn’t match assumptions, and regularly shared insights to ensure alignment throughout this long-tail effort.

Outcomes

1. For the first time in IBM’s history, we uncovered the technical content our clients want, and where they expect to find it.
   

2. We validated the relationship between different types of content, which helped us provide recommendations and patterns to help content teams quickly craft repeatable content experiences.
   

3. Beyond our stakeholder group, we took our findings on the road and socialized what we found to over 500+ content creators. Part of our vision was to make our users more capable, confident, and connected. Even a year later, those three C’s continue to surface across the business and have shaped IBM’s overall technical content strategy.