Novice to pro

There's learning how to use a tool. And there's learning how to do a job. And when you're designing for enterprise software, which can be very complex and technical, you often have to think about how you'll help users with both. 

Across our portfolio, product teams were building incredibly useful and sophisticated capabilities for customers. And the everyday use experience of those capabilities was often brilliant and very intuitive...for some users. For the seasoned professionals, mostly. But Getting Started experiences were often not given due consideration or time, and product teams were leaning too heavily on support documentation and the Support Desk (poor experience, slow adoption, and very expensive) to help users onboard to new experiences and use the products in more advanced ways.  

So, we set out to give product teams a continuous onboarding structure and experience-based playbook. One that caters to the important distinctions between roles, learning preferences, and motivations.

In this project, we integrated insights from comprehensive audits of onboarding experiences, gamification theory, Bartle's Taxonomy of Player Types, and psychological principles, alongside research on cybersecurity buyer personas and their decision-making processes. These findings informed the design of onboarding components and patterns, which we applied to a compelling test use case to create an engaging, user-centered experience.

I thoroughly enjoyed having the space to think deeply about what users needed to learn at each stage of their product adoption journey based on their experience, and to determine how and when to present those learning moments in a way that engaged users without disrupting their flow. Equally enriching was identifying the key metrics that would serve as indicators of user understanding. Perhaps most of all, I found it incredibly rewarding developing guidance and consulting with other teams to help them design effective, user-centered onboarding experiences.

1. Helped the team maintain progress during leadership transitions, coordinated sprint planning, and improved Jira story management to increase visibility and efficiency.
2. Refined user flows to focus on critical steps needed for users to understand product value quickly, improving adoption.
3. Co-wrote and edited the comprehensive novice to pro guidance, which was published on the Carbon for IBM Products Pattern Asset Library (PAL).
4. Introduced a new coachmark interaction, allowing both exploratory and focused learning paths tailored to diverse user motivations.
5. Provided design guidance to improve the novice to pro components.

1. Product teams across IBM are using our onboarding framework, components, and guides to create user-centric, continuous onboarding experiences.
2. Increased team efficiency through optimized sprint planning.
3. Earned the Outstanding Technical Achievement Award for technical leadership and vision.

“The team respects you so much and you manage to get the best out of everyone you work with!…For novice to pro, your advisory with Bridget and diligent reviews with the developers have resulted in a set of quality components and supporting documentation ready for the IBM Software community to use with confidence. You helped model and demonstrate how healthy cross-discipline partnerships lead to efficient and quality outcomes.”  

– C. Calder, Design Principle, IBM Security

“Congratulations on the great achievements of the novice to pro asset. You have earned this Outstanding Technical Achievement Award for your technical leadership and vision. Thank you for your dedication and commitment to success.” 

– H. Francis, VP of Design, IBM Security