IBM MaaS360 Product Content Design Presentation

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IBM MaaS360 Product Content Design

During my tenure with IBM, I had this great opportunity to work on SaaS driven MaaS360 product documentation – primarily the application portal content design.

MaaS360 is a mature product and its wide array of customer groups are spread worldwide. Catering to this varied audience groups content needs was an exciting challenge to work on.

The Business Pain Point

The technical content is bulky. What we can do about it? How can users find the information they need easily?

How my role as a Content Designer helped MaaS360 business and customers

I played the role of a Senior Information Developer and with what I contributed to the MaaS360 product development, I became the Content Designer and Developer.

My Approach

Firstly, I suggested the team that we start by analyzing the content metrices gathered for MaaS360 technical documentation. Along with my team, I reviewed the data logs for the MaaS360 product documentation to collect the following data:

  • Total number of technical documentation pages for MaaS360 product.
  • Page hit ratios of these content.
  • Pages with least number of visits, zero hit ratio, last visited details.

With this analysis, we were able to quickly get a fair amount of list with content pages that were least or never accessed by users.

Secondly, it was time to perform content structure analysis to understand why the content were heavily texted and not easy for users to understand. It was also the time to figure out methods on how we could make our technical content lean.

  • Here I applied the Double Diamond theory to get myself and team swiftly move through this challenge.

 

  • With the problem statement in hand, reviewed the feedbacks from users to identify specific pain points if any on where the technical content seemed bulky, was it only specific workflows, or throughout the documentation.
  • At the same time, skimmed through different workflows of the documentation to understand if the DITA structure were followed. Analyzed if information more than required by users were documented.
  • We diverged to figure out methods to make the documentation lean.
  • In the Define phase, we converged as a team to propose possible solutions to make content lean and easily accessible. I suggested context sensitive help method to begin with and adopting digital platform content going forward. Other team members also suggested on UX microcopies and quick help links in the user interface.
  • Gathered reviews from within the teams – product management, SMEs, SDETs, support teams to get their feedback on proposed solutions and draw timelines.
  • Discussed with other peers in the TechDocs team to gather their experiences and what’s worked best for them in terms of making documentation lean.
  • Had constant feedback loops in process with the product owners and the TechDocs manager.
  • Possible solution to implement at first was decided. To begin with, implementing context sensitive help and later on with WalkMe digital platform.

Proposed Solution and Outcome

Every solution proposed was backed up with data and a traceable path on why this fix is suggested.

  • Based on page views, page hits, support requests – get rid of those docs that are least viewed and never viewed.
  • Rewrite content with DITA structured authoring and remove content that were not relevant for the workflow. Trim down content more contextually.
  • Implementing context sensitive help for contextual content availability and to help customers find existing content easily that is applicable for the specific workflows.

Context Sensitive Help Implementation

  • I took the responsibility to identify the most important workflows and planned to address content structuring as a topic based.
  • Split large topics to simpler chunks of articles to easily link as a context sensitive topic from within the UI.
  • Communicated with the SDETs with publish link for the topics that needs to be embedded from within the UI.
  • Identified the most important topics, release notes, and other user centric help pages to be listed in the main page of the UI.
  • The project was targeted as a 9 month timeline. Worked closely with SMEs and project managers to  derive these timelines and agree upon topics that would be delivered in multiple releases.

Overall Process and My Role

  • I played the role of a Information Developer, introducing the context sensitive help and digital platform idea for the problem defined.
  • I lead the overall project, worked with stakeholders to work with realistic timelines.
  • Mentored other Tech Writers in implementing the project and scheduled weekly status call to ensure project went smooth in accordance to timelines and quality of work.
  • Encouraged team to work together unanimously and independently.
  • Worked along with my manager in USA and served as a bridge between the stakeholders and TechDocs manager.
  • My key skills of excellent communication, collaboration, asking the right questions to the SMEs, project managers helped me build the right strategy and confidence within the teams and on the project work.
  • I also hold excellent project management skills, enjoy building process to work effectively, deliver high quality work, and scoping down timelines.
  • The user’s issue to provide a lean documentation set that is easily understandable, easy to find the required content were addressed.
  • The tone and style of the technical content was in alignment with IBM style guide principles – neutral, present, active voice, consistent terms usage,
  • Primarily topic based authoring, contextual content by providing only information that will be required by users during the workflow.

  • To implement WalkMe for most important workflows in the application – onboarding and setup workflows as customers found documentation is heavy to follow. Also, a digital in UI texts would be useful to progressively disclose content to reduce cognitive overload.

Outcome

  • The support calls reduced as we delivered contextual content in phases.
  • The NPS score improved which showed that steps taken up documentation team is working well for users.
  • The page hit ratios were monitored to check content pages that were made available to users are all useful and least or none visited content pages were eventually removed from publishing site.

Benefits

An enhanced documentation experience for users and improved business. The product strategy combined with Design Thinking helped in brainstorming ideas and implementing solutions to improve content experiences for MaaS360 customers.

Retrospect

  • If the business unit had more bandwidth, the project could have been delivered fast to improve user experience and we could implement next steps of enhancing the product documentation in the same year.
  • I would also think of an approach to implement UX microcopies alongside developing context sensitive help project as these two steps compliment the overall user experience to find contextual information as and when needed while using the workflow.

Authored Tech Content

Here are some of the TechDocs work samples that I have authored at IBM MaaS360.