Marissa Kopelman

Impact

Led the redesign of IBM's intranet, used daily by all 350,000+ global employees, driving site personalization, a new tools directory, and improved news delivery. This transformation significantly boosted the NPS score from 19 to 46 and achieved an 88% user goal completion rate, greatly enhancing employee productivity.

what is it

IBM’s intranet, also known as the w3 Homepage, is a centralized hub for accessing tools and searching for information.

Globally used daily by all 350K+ IBM employees and contractors, this platform centralizes internal communications, information and employee search, and tooling access.

The challenge

The w3 Homepage's earlier iteration suffered from poor information findability and a lack of user personalization features.

Tasks related to the homepage became a major pain point for users. This highlighted the need for both a platform and content redesign. This was a critical and high-visibility project, essential due to its global IBM-wide usage.

My role

As Design Lead, I guided a team of UX, visual, and research designers.

I led the design team from pre-beta through multiple post-launch releases. My responsibilities included significant hands-on contributions to both UX and visual design. I collaborated closely with product leadership, the engineering team, and numerous IBM stakeholders to define the site's design direction and user experience, ensuring cross-product consistency within our domain.

The Goals

The main outcomes for the MVP were focused specifically on ease of tool discovery and access.

All users should be able to find a tool, current informational content, or an IBMer in less than 30 seconds. Users should be able to access their favorite or most used tools within 5 seconds.

The site would have more opportunities for personalization (saving favorite tools, tool recommendation based on job role, and user's learning plans). The site would be split into 3 pages - home, news, and tools.

discovery & process

Process

Throughout different stages of the project, I held agile workshops and design thinking sessions with the product team to further develop the site and upcoming features. I created a list of personas for our target users and identified their pain points that we were looking to solve. Our UX designers and researcher interviewed countless users from all areas of the company and world to discover their specific needs.

I worked closely with UX designers, visual designer, and researcher throughout the project to both set the direction and collaborate on designing new features. As a design team, we were given problems to solve that came from user feedback or requests from stakeholders. I wrote user stories for each of these issues and collaborated with the team to concept new ideas, map out user flows, and create scenarios and prototypes for usability sessions. We also had a set of user personas and a user journey to reference when designing new features.

When each design was ready for visual styling, I made sure each was pixel perfect, aligned with our grid, and followed the standards from our design system. I then worked closely with the developers to hand off the design and review the implementation.

Business Value & outcome

Increase in user satisfaction

The team successfully launched a new homepage that includes 3 tabs: Home, News, and Tools. The layout and content within these 3 pages allows for better organization with further detail and information that is more easily accessible. Users have the ability to save their favorite websites and tools to quickly access. The site has evolved in further releases to include more personalized news and learning content, a fully revamped and reorganized tools catalog, and a dark theme. We implemented a feedback button and surveys to measure the success of the site through user satisfaction and NPS score.

As a result, the NPS score increased from 19 to 46 with an 88% goal completion rate.

Enabled business goals

The goal of the CIO organization is to help IBMers be more productive and get their work done. The new homepage enables users to quickly find & access the information they need so they can spend more time completing their tasks.
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We also enabled stakeholders to achieve their own business goals by surfacing their most important information on the homepage for users to easily access.

IBM Intranet