Understanding the customers

New patterns needed for a new product

Our team at IBM was building a 0-1 platform tool that let solutions architects take a monolithic application and restructure it into microservices. This was a complex, technical transformation with no existing product to reference for tone, terminology, or user expectations.

Understanding the customers

Learning and creating a language

• The target users were solutions architects and developers who were technically fluent, and didn’t need language that oversimplified their work
• There was no set industry standard for the language and jargon being used by these users however, making it difficult to apply terminology directly from SME feedback

The impact

Building trust through guidance

We created and wrote an interacting product walk-through to guide users through this first-of-its-kind experience and set of interactions. We relied on a this first-time walk-through, and also implemented tooltips, modals, and contextual error states to guide users through this technically complex experience and use case.