digital communities
for technical experts
Empowering our existing digital communities
UX Designer at IBM | June — August 2021
A summer filled with coffee chats,
Webex and lots of learning!
Robert, Hannah and I tackled the IBM Communities, a web-experience that had major opportunity to grow and qualify customer lifetime value. This internship focused on digital strategy, product marketing, content strategy and UX/UI design.
At the conclusion, we presented our final showcase to over 100+ audience members with major praise for impact and even got to meet my team after a summer of Webex for a celebratory lunch in New York City!
Navigating the virtual internship is a unique and challenging experience, but allowed me to strengthen many invaluable skills.
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Pictured on the left is our celebratory post internship brunch in New York City! I finally got to meet my project managers and co-intern in person and it was the perfect way to end my IBM internship. Everyone was surprised how I tall I was.
Pictured above is the slower days where we spent getting to know eachother. In a virtual internship, it is important to take breaks to chat about our daily lives and silly moments!
Project Scope​
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To enhance the overall customer experience and lifetime value by listening to our clients, engaging with them on IBM Watson and Business analytics community pages and making recommendations as to how we can improve our marketing strategies to meet their demand.
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Project Scope​
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Why are communities important?​
​1. Retain and engage existing customers which is important for B2B products
2. Improve the customer experience
3. Drive product innovation by receiving direct feedback from real users
4. Cross-sell and upsell the IBM brand, products, and experience overall.
Why is this important for IBM?​
IBM needs to strengthen and maintain the client’s lifetime journey to sustain competitive market share. Existing satisfied B2b clients generate significantly more profit than new clients.
Existing IBM Communities Experience
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Meet Axl
The senior financial planner and analyst
He works with MS Excel, Power BI, Oracle, & SAP.
After successfully integrating Planning Analytics, he has many questions about the product’s capabilities.
He is curious about optimizing the product and wants to connect and chat with other enterprise users with related needs.
“I don’t want to talk to another salesperson. I want to know how other business users like me are using Planning Analytics.”
Current state
IBM Communities
lacks gamification, has a confusing user experience, and contains overwhelming amount of content.
We discovered a confusing and overwhelming user experience
By analyzing quantitative and qualitative data in HotJar, Pearl, and Google Analytics, we found an overarching lacking sense of community that stemmed from a confusing user experience, absence of gamification, and overwhelming amount of content.
Final Showcase Key Pain Points
The New Business User Community Experience
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1. Activate
Optimizing the Community layout to encourage community members to immediately access all desired content in an organized and intuitive manner.
2. Adore
Improving the human-feel of the community pages will allow members to be able to connect with one another. This includes reducing steps and providing more CTAs.
3. Advocate
Once the user is engaged, it is time to empower and reward users to become IBM Champions or Analytics Heroes.
4. Adopt
Cater copy in blogs and titles to business community members to improve quality of page session. By doing so, we can effectively meet the needs of the target user.
So what's next?
With our final recommendations, we hope community members like Axl can feel empowered, engaged and rewarded within IBM Communities.
What does this mean for IBM?
In doing so, IBM will cultivate, grow and maintain client relationships to improve the customer lifetime value for
existing customers.