Improving UX with microcopy

Case study examining UX paper cuts in the IBM Cloud private catalog and I how I improved the end user experience with microcopy and documentation.

Role

Lead content designer

Scope

UX content strategy

Technical writing

Timeline

3 weeks

Tools

Figma

Visual Studio Code

GitHub

Overview

Background

 

Problem

 

Private catalogs provide a way for users to centrally manage access to IBM Cloud products and products that users onboard themselves. You can onboard you own product to a private catalog and publish it to the public catalog, or share it with other accounts privately.

 

Customers reported confusion around the share state of products in private catalogs.

  • Inconsistent icon usage

  • Hidden share status

  • Navigation uses different terms to go to the same place

Original experience

Go to Actions > Share or Publish, depending on whether the product is approved by IBM in Partner Center.

  • If the product is not approved by IBM, you can Share it with other accounts, and those accounts must accept your share request.

  • If the product is approved by IBM through Partner Center, you can Publish a product to other accounts or the public IBM Cloud catalog. The product is published automatically without the other account accepting a request.

Sharing a private product with other accounts.

The Lock icon indicates that the product is not shared or published. However, this conflicts with the usage of the same icon within the sharing flow.

Accounts that accept a share request see the Lock icon in their public cloud catalog, indicating that it was shared from another account.

So, in one instance the Lock icon means the product is not shared, and in another instance it means that the product was shared to me from another account.

Private product shared with me.

Products that are Shared or Published also share the same icon, conflicting and hiding the true status of the product.

Published to allowlisted accounts.

Shared to allowlisted accounts.

The button “View product visibility.” uses punctuation and is long for a CTA.

Updated experience

My recommendation was to remove the icon as the share status indicator because it creates an extra step for the user to discover the share status. Also, move the visibility status to the Catalog entry details section. For the Actions dropdown, use Manage visibility as the navigation title consistently across products that can be shared or published. This increases the consistency of the UX and follows progressive disclosure.