IBM Skills

Learning never stops. IBM provides over 3,000 free online courses on multiple IBM educational sites, they help organizations and people build critical skills to grow and remain competitive, to set users up for ongoing success.

We want to utilize IBM education assets within a centralized portal that produces tangible and measurable outcomes that aligns with goals and motivations for users’ lifelong education journey. We successfully launched IBM Skills in 12 weeks.

MY ROLE

Co-planning the project workflow with Project Manager and cross-functional teams.
Guided the IBMEdu team in identifying, prioritizing and shaping the user base to be addressed from start to finish.
Quantitative research over 3,000 courses on IBM educational sites and content analysis.
Developed wireframe and expanded the IBM design system

GOAL

IBM offers thousand of free continuous education resources, funded by over one hundred years of technical expertise.

IBM wants to give users the right tools, create a holistic career development ecosystem for its community.

WEBSITE

https://skillsbuild.org/

PROJECT OVERVIEW

Be Resilience and Consumable

IBM Education offers thousand of free continuous education resources. We want to utilize IBM education assets within a centralized portal that produces tangible and measurable outcomes that aligns with user goals and motivations for users’ lifelong learning journey.

Challenges and opportunities

IBM has more than 3000 free course among IBM education programs
IBM also provides IBM badges and IBM Certifications for IBMer and general user
Only 12 weeks for this project
Work with IBM teams across multiple locations
Use IBM design system for brand identity

01 MESSAGING

During the first week we had a creative work session with engineers, copy wirter, UX team and Todd Simmons - VP, Brand Experience & Design from IBM.

The following four key messages and supporting points should be used when creating longer form content and communication that is intended to further build the IBM Skills brand.

Learn from the Pros

With over a century of experience and more patents than any other company, IBM has always stood on the forefront of innovation, creating
the tools and methods that reimagine how we work. Relying on our time-tested expertise, we help you master critical technologies today and prepare for what’s coming next tomorrow.

Skills for Everyone

We believe the future belongs to everyone. That’s why we provide apprenticeships, free education programs and partner with educators and institutions to prepare learners of all ages for 21st Century jobs.

Learn on Your Terms

We know there’s no one-way to learn new things. That’s why we meet you where
you are—in school, online or in your office. Whether you’re a curious high school student or an experienced professional, our broad range of available courses, mentorships and opportunities for hands-on practice make it possible to start learning the critical tools you need to succeed right away.

Never Stop Learning

We expect every industry to keep evolving. IBM can help you build the skills needed to future-proof your career and expand on what you already know through learnings paths, career advice and guidance from experienced professionals.

02 UX RESEARCH

3 months before we kicked off the project, 12 UX interviews have done by IBM UX research team and students from University of Texas at Austin in the Fall of 2019. Those user interviews including students, developers, job seekers and educators. I then worked with a UX researcher from IBM to conduct interviews results withstatistic analysis.

Below are research highlights were generated by IBM UX research team and our secondary research:

Prioritize key audiences and goals

With help from IBM user research team, we quickly got the user segmentation, learning’s motivations and pain points. We then break down the number of user groups from 14 to 4 by identify user goals.

The target audience for IBM Skills are the Core Learners. There are four main groups – Professionals, Students, Parents and Teachers, Partners, and Clients. These groups have different backgrounds and needs, and will be looking for content specific to their learning journey.

“These groups have different backgrounds and needs, and will be looking for content specific to their learning journey”

03 CONTENT STRATEGY

Content audit and quantitative research

Content audit on current 12 IBM educational programs. Over 3000 programs.
Download the whole website, use character genetator and excel sheet for data analysis.
Quantitative User-Research to find out the most frequent course name and roles
Goal and audience mapping
Tag and categorize programs

List of features from IBM Education sites

Chatbot
Certifications
Badges
Learning Path
Youtube Videos
3000+ Courses
Login
Learning Dashboard
Link to IBM Careers

Competitor analysis

The purpose of the competitive analysis is to determine the strengths and weaknesses of the competitors within your market. It is also a good way to see past attempt to fix similar issue.

What we are looking at:

How they keep user staying engaging with educational resouces
How to make a learning paln for user to achieve their goal
How to better guide the user to find the right content without feeling overwhelmed
Keep the brand reliable and onbrand

Websites we like:

Coursera - Personalized learning path
Grow with Google - simple and clean
Lynda.com - Sharing Lynda.com certificates of completion on Linkedin.

Moodboard

04 SOME CHALLENGES DURING DESIGN PHASE

Roll based or skill based?

After user research and content strategy phase, me and IBM UX team quickly made a sitemap and start working on wireframe development. The first challenging came to us was: should the learning journey start from a picking a role or picking a skill?

Sitemap

Option #1 - Handpicked courses from IBM employees or professionals

To better keep user staying engaging and motivating with their learning journey, I designed wireframe #1.

Starting from handpicked courses from IBM experties, here we make sure the content is reliable and personalized, user can easily learn from the pros career journey. Through demonstration and hands-on practices, user will achive their learning goal without feeling overwhelmed.

Following with “Up coming events” and “related articles”, user can find more in-depth content and supportive learning community.

Option #2 - User find the right courses filter by rolls

Starting from user role (Professionals, Students, Parents and Teachers, Partners, and Clients), option 2 provides related learning progrmas based on user need.

Considering the tight timeline and budget, we decided to move forward with option #2. Here is a close look at the design.

_Homopage:

_{Category Landing:}

_{Article page:}

05 QUICK PROTOTYPE IN PRINCIPLE BEFORE LAUNCH

06 FINAL PRODUCT

https://skillsbuild.org/

07 KEY TAKEAWAYS AND LEARNING

We presented our research findings and final design to over 10 stakeholders from IBM Education, IBM Design, engineers, and other members from Havas. The responses had been more positive than we could ever expect, the lead from IBM Education said he can’t wait to introduce IBM Skills to all IBMers.

We also got significant increased in email sign up, for meetup events and courses related reminder. Our goal for next phase is to introduce the learning center for user to keep on track with their learning progress and get notifications.