From Interactions to Experiences Through Service Design
In May of 2021, IBM hosted its first-ever internal design conference: SPARK. This three-day virtual conference was organized by IBM designers to inspire and learn from each other.
During the conference, I had the honor of presenting a recorded talk entitled “From Interactions to Experiences Through Service Design” where I shared my experience of improving the onboarding journey of an early-hire mainframe developer persona across multiple IBM touch-points in IBM Z Open Editor, a new generation mainframe development editor with over 40,000 downloads.
My own experience in working with this persona provided key takeaways and learning opportunities that I believe are invaluable to the design experience.
Why do we need personas?
When we establish personas and identify their needs, it becomes easier for a business to empathize and craft future delightful experiences. Personas help product teams to empathize with their end-users by understanding their needs and behaviors, thus influencing the product strategy. Simply put, personas allow us to connect with a user’s pain-points, wants, and needs, all in the early stages of design.
Historically, mainframe developer personas have been focused on product functionality. With the entry of digitally savvy, early-hire mainframe developers in the industry, IBM Z client organizations stand to gain in productivity by providing quick onboarding to the developers through easy-to-use mainframe development tools.
So, let’s meet our persona and the product that will influence her onboarding journey.
Who is Deb?
Deb is an early z/OS developer. She’s completed her undergraduate studies in computer science and is hired by a large IT company to join their mainframe team as an early-hire mainframe developer.
Deb says: I’ve heard that the current mainframe editors have a longer learning curve. During my university studies, I have only used modern development editors that are Graphical user interface-based and very user friendly.
Deb’s key question
Can I develop mainframe programs using the code editors that I’m already familiar with to reduce the steep learning curve?
What is the product?
IBM Z Open Editor is a modern mainframe development editor for mainframe developers.
By bringing IBM z/OS language support to Visual Studio code, developers have the freedom to code in COBOL, PL/1, High-level assembler or REXX and languages, such as Java and JavaScript.
A look at Deb’s onboarding journey in IBM Z Open Editor
Over the past 2 years, I’ve worked to improve Deb’s experiences across IBM’s portfolio, simplifying her onboarding journey of getting up-to-speed in a modern mainframe code editor.
In 2019, through my design research and market research from business stakeholders and leadership team, our team identified VS Code as a primary preferred code editor for Deb.
Our insights paved the way for a new product, IBM Z Open Editor, which became the basis for our popular IDE IBM Wazi Developer for Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces.
After identifying our product, we needed to help Deb move to the next step in her learning journey by giving her a hands-on overview of the mainframe development environment. We were able to do this through the Z Trial experience, a process that makes it easier to get hands-on with z/OS.
Z Trial is a major step in accessibility. It offers anyone the chance to experience a number of different Z portfolio products without the need to install, access a mainframe, or even pay.
The Z Trial experience allowed Deb to familiarize herself with the mainframe development environment through industry use-cases of debugging, editing, and building a sample COBOL application project through IBM Z Open Editor.
Based on the user feedback from Deb, the experience was improved both in the tutorial content and in the editor experience.
In 2020, we helped Deb quickly gain an overview of the z/OS content and installation experience as part of her onboarding journey. I collected user feedback to improve her existing content experience, and collaborated very closely with content designers and developers to conduct user studies on both IBM Knowledge Center content and the Z Open Editor blogs.
From interactions to touch points
My experience with Deb’s journey ultimately led me to the following takeaways:
- No touch point is too small to be ignored
Increase the scope of design research to content experiences by partnering with your content design team and developers. Think of content as part of the experience. - Collaborate with content designers and developers
Be a partner to solve their problems and provide coaching to conduct usability tests. - Identify the ecosystem for your primary and secondary personas Identify the ecosystem for primary and secondary personas in your product, and their digital and non-digital touch points. Focus on improving critical content experiences of the primary persona through user studies, and show evidence of a better onboarding experience to the product team.
As I look back at the learning journey of Deb, it’s clear that applying mindset of service design in my design research has helped in her onboarding journey to improve her specific content experiences.
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I want to thank the following Z Open Editor team for their wonderful support and collaboration.
- Raichel Sheeja Varghese Babu | Product Manager, Wazi Developer for Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces (Wazi Developer)
- Peter Haumer | Senior Technical Staff Member (STSM), Development Lead for IBM Wazi
- Jason Enzi | UX Designer, Z DevOps
- Bradley Knaysi | Associate Software Developer, IBM Wazi Developer
- Billie Jean Simmons | Software Developer, DevOps for IBM Z Hybrid Cloud
- Kristina Mayo | Senior Software Developer, z/OS Cloud IDE
- Min Huang | Content Design Lead, Z DevOps
- Yvonne Ma | Content Strategist, IBM Z Software
- Sherri Hanna | Principal Product Manager DevOps, IBM Z Go-To-Market
Arun Martin is a Design Researcher based in Ontario. The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies, or opinions.
