Helping Users Understand and Successfully Launch on a Complex Cloud Platform

My role began with a focused brief: design the provisioning workflow and ensure page-level consistency for a new IaaS offering on IBM Cloud's VMware platform. But the launch quickly exposed broader challenges.

Carbon Design System was undergoing a major upgrade, deprecating many components we relied on. A new Design & UX Review (DUX Review) process introduced stricter consistency requirements. And the new offering reshaped the entire product lineup, making the existing overview page structurally obsolete.

Rather than stay in scope, I identified three areas where targeted design intervention could meaningfully improve the launch experience.

The environment was shifting faster than the existing design process could accommodate:

• —The overview page no longer reflected the hierarchy or purpose of the product lineup
• —First-time users couldn't successfully provision the service without completing undocumented prerequisites — leading to silent failures, repeated attempts, and support escalations
• —A new DUX Review process had surfaced over 40 consistency and accessibility gaps with no clear remediation plan in place

Each problem was solvable independently. Together, they represented a systemic readiness gap that needed coordinated design leadership to address.

The existing overview page presented an undifferentiated list of services that left users without answers to the most basic questions: What's core infrastructure vs. an add-on? How do supporting services fit together? How complex is provisioning, really?

I conducted interviews with 12 internal users — solution architects, support engineers, and onboarding specialists — to understand how they interpreted the product lineup. Three themes emerged consistently: users couldn't distinguish core infrastructure from add-ons, they underestimated provisioning complexity, and they needed contextual guidance rather than separate documentation.

Based on these insights, I restructured the IA into meaningful categories: primary IaaS offerings, use-case-oriented groupings for add-ons, learning resources, and a more accurate representation of the provisioning process. Because the console was migrating to a new Carbon release, I also designed versioned solutions for each phase — Beta, GA, and full Carbon upgrade — giving engineering a clear roadmap while maintaining a consistent experience across incremental releases.

First-time users consistently failed to provision the service due to undocumented prerequisites that were invisible in the UI. The new product launch created an opportunity to finally address this at scale.

I created detailed journey maps showing exactly where failures occurred and how they affected users before they ever experienced the product itself. Rather than presenting this as a design problem, I framed it as a business risk — walking PM through the user journey, business implications, and impact on launch readiness.

This led to strong alignment and a phased improvement plan: Phase 1 delivered inline guidance and setup messaging during provisioning; Phase 2 scoped longer-term engineering work to remove prerequisites entirely. The approach became a template for addressing hidden complexity in future launches.

The first DUX Review surfaced over 40 issues spanning component consistency, accessibility, documentation, and cross-product interaction patterns — with no clear process for resolving them.

I created a centralized tracker categorizing all issues by severity, ownership, and dependencies, giving PMs and engineers the visibility needed to plan sprints effectively. I then aligned with PM and engineering leads on design lock dates, in-code review checkpoints, and remediation deadlines. Recurring check-ins, async audits, and pre-review walkthroughs with the Carbon team minimized rework and kept the team aligned with evolving system standards.

• —Successfully launched the new IaaS product, now adopted by enterprise customers
• —Delivered a restructured overview page that accurately reflected the product hierarchy
• —Improved first-time provisioning success through embedded guidance and clearer setup flows
• —Resolved 40+ DUX issues through a structured, cross-functional remediation process
• —Scaled the DUX preparation process to two adjacent product teams, establishing a shared approach to launch readiness
• —Recognized by IBM Public Cloud's Director of Design for cross-functional leadership during a complex organizational transition

While direct metrics for first-time provisioning success weren't available at launch, early enterprise adopters and product partners provided positive feedback on clarity and ease of getting started.