w3 Homepage

The w3 Homepage is IBM’s internal homepage that is used by all IBM employees as a starting point for accessing tools and searching for information.
Company
IBM
My Role
Design lead
Type
Creative direction, UX, interaction, and visual design
Tools
Sketch, Illustrator, InVision, Zeplin, Figma

My Role

As design lead and primary visual designer on the project, I led a team of UX designers, a visual designer, and a design researcher from pre-beta to several releases after our main launch. I worked closely with our product team and owner, as well as countless stakeholders from different areas of IBM to form our design direction and user experience of the site. I also collaborated with related design teams within our domain to ensure consistency across products.

The Challenge

The previous version of the homepage was lacking in user personalization and findability of information.

This brought about the need for a redesign of the entire site and the content that was being displayed. This was both a high priority and high visibility project, as the site is used by all ~350K IBMers.

The Goals

The main outcomes for the MVP were focused specifically on the experience of new hires at IBM.

New hires should be able to easily navigate the site and find any information they need. We would build a custom widget that gives new weekly onboarding information for new hires during their first 100 days at the company.

All other users should be able to access their most used tools in 5 seconds or less. The site will have more opportunities for personalization, such as saving favorite tools and a section dedicated to the user's courses and learning. The site will be split into 3 pages - home, news, and tools.

Discovery & Process

Throughout different stages of the project, we held agile workshops and design thinking sessions with the product team to further develop the site and upcoming features. We created a list of personas for our target users and identified their pain points that we were looking to solve. Our UX designers and researcher interviewed countless users from all areas of the company and world to discover their specific needs.

I worked closely with UX designers, visual designer, and researcher throughout the project to both set the direction and collaborate on designing new features. As a design team, we were given problems to solve that came from user feedback or requests from stakeholders. I wrote user stories for each of these issues and collaborated with the team to concept new ideas, map out user flows, and create scenarios and prototypes for usability sessions. We also had a set of user personas and a user journey to reference when designing new features. When each design was ready for visual styling, I made sure each was pixel perfect, aligned with our grid, and followed the standards from our design system. I then worked closely with the developers to hand off the design and review the implementation.

Outcome

The team successfully launched a new homepage that includes 3 tabs: Home, News, and Tools. The layout and content within these 3 pages allows for better organization with further detail and information that is more easily accessible. Users have the ability to save their favorite websites and tools to quickly access. We launched a New Hire section with content from onboarding teams to help new employees adjust and learn company information. The site has evolved in further releases to include more personalized news and learning content, a fully revamped and reorganized tools catalog, and a dark theme. We implemented a feedback button and surveys to measure the success of the site through user satisfaction and NPS score.
Note: Images and text are placeholders as to not disclose any confidential internal information.
Copyright © Marissa Kopelman 2023