Platform Unification Project (PUP)
This may have been the hairiest design and development effort we’d ever undertaken. Alongside the best team that could be imagined, we delivered and then some.
Problem
After IBM acquired SoftLayer, customers were stuck with two separate consoles, two separate account models, and two divergent visual languages. Hundreds of pages across two consoles (one of which our team had never even seen), and differing account types multiplying the issue. Customers thought of “IBM Cloud” as one thing — but it wasn’t.
Insight
This wasn’t a technical reconciliation problem — it was an information-architecture one. A whirlwind week of content audit, heuristic review, and enterprise card-sorting (thank you, Angela Runge) made the shape of the unified product visible: Account Stuff · Money Stuff · Access Stuff. Once the IA was named, the engineering reconciliation had a target.
Solution
One unified account, billing, and access experience for IBM Cloud — built from the IA recommendation up, iterated through usability testing, and shipped globally. The launch day brought celebrations on the same timezone-spanning Slack channel from Durham/RTP, Austin, Rome, Toronto/Markham, and Beijing.
The process, in chronological order
From an empty whiteboard to usability testing, our team was cranking to get this done both well and quickly: as-is audits, heuristic reviews, an IA recommendation, then iteration as usability test learnings drove understanding. Putting screens into device frames for internal and outward communications made the thing feel real. Seeing them built by an amazing dev team made them feel realer still. Releasing them to customers in the wild made them the realest. That’s what we work for.
The Platform Unification Project delivered a complete transformation of the IBM Cloud experience for our users, bringing together resources and capabilities across Platform-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-as-a-Service within a unified, contemporary user experience. The innovation required to deliver this unified experience was enormous, with implications from the top of the stack all the way through black-end integration across complex and disparate business-critical systems. The result is a completely new way for users to experience IBM Cloud, with unification across discovery and provisioning of services, access and resource management and billing, a newly centralized support experience, and more. IBM’s description of the project (PUP, 2019 Stratus Award)
What it earned
- IBM Corporate Technical Award — for impact on the IBM Cloud Platform Unification Project
- IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement Award — also for PUP
- 2019 Stratus Award for Cloud Computing — whole IBM Cloud platform design team