Understanding the business problem

A lack in content systems

IBM Transformation Advisor helps teams migrate applications from local servers to the cloud, and this experience is shaped by the migration rules written by the platform developers. The developer team was missing a standard for how to create these migration rules, and ended up creating rules and migration paths that lacked clarity and structure.

Getting to know the users

There was a lack of shared language

• These software migration rules were mostly written for other developers and software architects, who were highly familiar in the domain, and didn’t need much knowledge onboarding, aside from product-specific functions
• The developers writing the migration rules didn’t have writing or user experience principles in mind, like consistency and clarity, and were primarily focused on communicating technical functionality

The impact

Providing a voice for this domain

We created the foundation of a style guide specifically for these migration rules, establishing patterns and conventions developers could apply directly, without re-explaining domain concepts they already understood. These writing guidelines allowed developers draft standardized, clear, and legible documentation for a highly technical and complex process.

The result

A consistent technical content standard

As the platform development team had a set of content standards to refer to, the users of IBM Transformation Advisor had an easier time onboarding to and understanding the needs of their software migration experience. We received stakeholder feedback that these writing guidelines were not only improving but speeding up the rule creation process for the development team, showing a promising start to the developer user experience.