Overview
The Nielsen-Norman group identifies efficiency of use and minimalist design as 2 of its 10 Usability Heuristics for user-interface design. While innovation earns the plaudits, making old things work better is just as impactful. This was the goal when designing IBM Partner Plus. The result of years of wayward strategy and laissez-faire process management was a disparate, inefficient, and burdensome experience for IBM business partners. These users were made to navigate through multiple entry points, across portals, and around hundreds of pages to complete simple tasks and find key information. Our team was tasked with simplifying and improving this experience for partners through the design and execution of IBM Partner Plus.
Partner landing page providing an Overview of the Partner Plus program
The Challenge
Prior to the launch of Partner Plus, IBM business partners used multiple portals and dashboards added over the course of many years by various product owners, amounting in a complex, disjointed, and frustrating user journey. The ask was to house all of the tasks that partners accomplished via these disconnected sites under one roof, while updating the look and feel to comply with company’s design system. Essentially this meant trimming hundreds of pages to roughly 40 while maintaining all relevant information. Much of the skill here involved gathering and appeasing all of the various page owners while ultimately making the IBM partner experience more efficient through an elegant and minimalist design.
A new user flow enables prospective partners to register on their own time, without the need of a customer service representative
The Approach
It was first important to determine the jobs to be done for partners through the use of this portal. Internal stakeholders provided valuable insight here, but often this came with biases rooted in the specific areas of the journey that fell within their responsibility. Interviews with business partners were valuable in determining exactly what tasks they needed to accomplish via the portal. It was also useful to view performance metrics to understand where and when drop-off occurred during registration for new partners. This portal served multiple personas (existing partners, prospective new partners, partner liasons). A combination of interviews, observation, and analysis revealed the full scope of functionality required to serve all of their needs.
The redesign required updating to the latest version of IBM’s design system and thanks to its robustness, design and development ran smoothly. Marketing pages for prospective new partners and registration forms relied primarily on templates, patterns, and components. Much of the creativity here came from data visualisation to enable incentive tracking for existing partners.
More detailed program overview
The Outcome
IBM Partner Plus trimmed 140+ pages to 39. It provided program information for new partners and relatively painless registration. The improvements yielded 42% increase in page visitors in the two weeks post-launch. Ninety-two percent of users that started registration completed it to enrol as new partners. Further downstream, improvements in incentive tracking resulted in a substantial decrease in support tickets.
Basic form design with progress indicator