IBM Leadership Academy

IBM Leadership Academy is a one-stop shop of career development programs and resources serving a global community of over 300,000 IBM employees.

Overview

My role

At a company that prioritizes career growth and continuous learning for employees, finding programs and resources for leadership development should be easy.

Instead, users found themselves lost in an outdated interface and a navigation system that was more like a maze. The original Leadership Academy website was launched in 2015 and had not been touched since.

By overhauling and improving the usability of the website, our team increased user engagement, program enrollment rates, and Net Promoter Score (NPS).

The team

Designer, product manager, and two full-stack developers.

The scope

Improve overall site usability by uncovering the needs of IBM employees across three career personas: Manager, Executive, and Technical Leader.

As design lead—and sole designer on the team—I conducted user research and usability testing, developed prototypes, and determined the overall visual direction of the new Leadership Academy website.

I also educated my teammates and our executive stakeholders on the various UX and Enterprise Design Thinking processes necessary to create a product that would not only better serve our users, but also improve business results such as program enrollment rates and Net Promoter Score (NPS).

Process

Original IBM Leadership Academy homepage

Discovery research

Before I joined the team, user research had never been done before. I convinced my executive stakeholders to allot the time for user interviews and testing by connecting user needs to business impacts like NPS score and program enrollment.

I conducted user testing for the original Leadership Academy website with a group of 28 global sponsor users, each representing one (or a combination) of the three personas: Manager, Executive, or Technical Leader. My goals were to understand the challenges each persona faced when navigating the website and observe how one would complete a task to find information relative to each persona. I asked each user to walk us through two tasks: one that all visitors may complete regardless of career and one specific to their persona.

As a result, I uncovered pain points unique to each persona as well as universal pain points:

“I find it to be very busy, my eyes have no idea where to go.”

“It’s hard for me to tell what's most important or what the Leadership Development team wants me to focus on.”

“It's not super obvious what the different areas are for, just by glancing at them, unless you knew what you were coming here for.”

“Could be more straightforward, explicit and engaging.”

Prototyping & testing

Upon completing and synthesizing my discovery research, I began redesigning each segment of Leadership Academy within two-week Agile sprints. Working through the Enterprise Design Thinking "Loop," I continuously tested my redesigns by observing my users through remote user testing, reflecting upon the results, and making changes to fit their needs. I also used A/B testing to inform decisions such as information hierarchy, navigation style, and calls to action.

At the end of every sprint I presented the newly redesigned pages to our executive stakeholders alongside the data to validate my decisions. With stakeholder approval, I passed my designs along to my team's developers to build and launch each page in a staggered approach, starting with the homepage, continuing through each career persona page, and finally every program and resource page in order of prioritization based on visit analytics.

Dream it.
Build it.
Grow it.
Sell it.