Benefits Redesign

IBM Partner Portal sees thousands of unique business partners every day, and the Partners Benefits page is one of the key pages that outlines what they have access to. This research was intended to validate key design decisions to ensure the right information is being displayed to partners at the right time.

Note: Because Partner Portal is not available for public view and only for IBM Business Partners, I will be focusing on the research methods, high-level findings and recommendations.

TL;DR

Running short on time? No worries! Here are some key takeaways:

Business Challenge: Thousands of IBM Business Partners visit the IBM Partner Portal every month, are the needs of partners being met with the current design? Are partners taking advantage of all the benefits they have access to?

Research Goal: To get feedback from IBM Business Partners about the new design for Benefits in the Partner Portal.

Solution: Conducted a heuristic evaluation and 6 usability sessions with IBM business partners. Prioritized tasks and collected feedback to understand how partners interact with the page.

Results: Validated design decisions, advocated for the voice of the end user, identified areas of the page that had no business being there, uncovered patterns of user behavior that were not previously accounted for, and provided insights to simplify the interactions corresponding to key tasks

My Role: UX researcher, facilitator

Introduction

Fall 2022

PartnerWorld out, Partner Plus in

A huge endeavor was initiated to overhaul IBM’s PartnerWorld program and introduce IBM Partner Plus, a brand new way that IBM business partners can conduct business with IBM

Dec 2022

Preparation for launch

Our team was tasked to consolidate and simplify the PartnerWorld pages that partners would interact with. With tight deadlines and constant content changes, the IBM Partner Benefits page was launched without input from users

Jan 2023

Post-launch clarity

After a successful launch in Q12023, the UX research team was brought in to ensure that IBM business partners could interact with the page in a useful way

Design thinking process

We are here

Project Roadmap

Establish & priorities Scoping meetings
Stakeholderinterviews

Project Intake

Create participants list
Create correspondence with participants
Create Research Script
Create prototypes for testing

Research prep

Re-watch user testing videos
Create Mural board, identify themes and broad ideas

Analyze data

Establish research

Creating research protocol
Review research plan with the team
Establish a home for research artifacts
Establish which research type is best

Conduct research

Schedule participants
Run a mock interview
Run the usability sessions

Playback & Share findings

Playback findings to design teams
Iterate on designs

Heuristics & Design Iterations

We used NN’s guide for heuristic evaluations to identify other areas of potential gaps that users could have problems with. Our past experience with the target personas and interactions with the end user proved to be valuable “first line of defense” when it came to uncovering pain points.

We were able to engage with the design team to iterate on the designs to make sure that we were putting our “best foot forward” in front of the end users.

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Click here to learn more about NN's usability heuristics

Planning & Doing the Research

While the stakeholders and design team were trying to determine the design details of the page that should be tested, we started getting research activities ready for the usability study.

Cross-Functional Teams Involved

UX Research team
UX Design team
Development team
Product Owners
Workstream leads
Content Design
Business development

My role involved:

Formulating hypotheses

Partners would be able to engage with the benefits that are most useful for them according to tier.
Partners will want to search for benefits if they have one in mind.

Creating research questions

How do partners search for their benefits?
How do they find their benefits today?

Creating the usability test tasks

Task 1: Where in this page would you go to learn more about benefits you would gain in the next tier level?

Creating prototypes

For this project we partnered with a designer to prepare the prototypes for testing

Participant recruitment

Identified the target audience, created correspondence templates and scheduled participants for the study

Conducting the sessions

With the help of a note-taker, we conducted 6 usability sessions with IBM Business partners

Synthesis

After we conducted the sessions, I re-watched every session to make sure the notes were accurate, anonymized the participants so no personal information was visible, and organized the notes by tasks.

I then grouped the responses corresponding to the action and correlated them to the tasks that we asked participants to create. This allowed me to think about the larger picture, emerging themes, and holistically think about the experience.

I then realized that the synthesis and findings would not make sense to anyone without the context of the page itself. I overlaid the final findings (positives, negatives, and recommendations) on the corresponding Parter Portal page giving the stakeholders a clear picture of our findings and our designers clear and actionable next steps.

"I particularly like the fact that you you did your commentary on the screenshots.It's just lovely that you're immediately grounded in the context of what you're talking about as a team, rather than trying to look at us PowerPoint deck and try and work out what does this text relate to."

- Stakeholder

Research Outcomes

Validated design decisions

Brought in user input to influence design decisions that were on the table for stakeholders

Uncovered behavior patterns

Uncovered patterns of user behavior that were not previously accounted for

Advocated for the end user

Ensured that the changes made to future iterations of the page were helpful to the end user

Interaction simplification

Provided insights to simplify the interactions corresponding to key tasks

Identified unnecessary areas of the page

Identified areas that were not particularly useful for the user, or would lead them down a tangent path

Provided recommendations in time for deployment

Worked in 2 week sprints to get the research and insights finished by the time dev teams needed input

Lessons Learned

We found that the size of the company impacts their priorities when they interact with the page. In future iterations we would want more representation from tier levels other than Platinum and Gold.

Research should be involved at the very beginning of a redesign of a page, ensuring that the voice of the target audience is taken into consideration from the very beginning.

Business Impact

Faster time to revenue

Showcasing the partner's benefits first so partners aren't left wondering what they have access to, enabling them to access their benefits faster to get to revenue faster.

Increased engagement with Benefits

Cutting out the noise and distractions to ensure partners optimize benefits that are available to them.

Increased efficiency

Streamlined how search results are displayed, allowing partners to focus on core business activities resulting in increased productivity and efficiency.

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