Gamification of Hybrid Cloud Platform | IBM Carbon

Gamification of Hybrid Cloud Partner Platform

Graduate Design Project / Duration: 7 weeks

Background

The design brief for the project was provided by IBM for a proposed hybrid cloud platform (“Project Integro”). IBM Partners are individuals who collaborate with the company to build, sell, and provide services to their own clients. Partners typically strive to incorporate hybrid cloud technology into their products and services.

While there are a number of ways in which Partners can use cloud technology, there is no one single way to get started, learn, and grow with the company. For this project we aimed to create a single unified platform that allows Partners to start and progress along their hybrid cloud journey in a simple and straightforward way.

Goals

Create a single platform that integrates all hybrid cloud products in a user friendly manner
Improve discoverability to help Partners uncover new opportunities to participant in cloud solutions

Use gamification and game theory to incentivize users to continue their journey as a partner
Build an interactive prototype in Axure and present our design

We began our design process by creating user personas, user flows, and a conceptual model (object-action matrix, attribute table, prioritization matrix).

Ideation

Information Architecture

Both global and local searches are supported by our design. Filters are used throughout the platform and have varying capability. The industry leaderboard can be filtered by various categories (revenue, deployments, certifications, competencies).

The voice of the site follows IBM’s clean, sophisticated brand. It is friendly, yet not too playful. We aimed for the tone to be professional but easygoing. The vocabulary we used is consistent with IBM’s content design guidelines. The verbiage follows that documented in the Carbon design system. The taxonomy corresponds to our conceptual model and the objects and actions represented within it.

Gamification

Mission

Users receive continuous feedback (via progress indicators and reviews/ratings) which keeps them engaged
Rewarding users with cloud credits ensures that they will be exchanging their rewards for products and services on our platform (rather than elsewhere)

Mechanics

We used game mechanics of achievement, feedback, privilege, reciprocity, urgency, and recognition.
These were implemented via badges, rewards, and challenges

Final Design & Reflection

We were able to present a successful design to our sponsors at IBM, however there are still improvements that could be made with more time, testing, and iterations. While gamification was implemented throughout the design (most heavily in the area of Cloud Courses and initial sign-up) there is room for more development in the area of selling hybrid cloud packs to other consumers. IBM Partners could be further incentivized to continue their journey on the site with better dashboard tracking of their accomplishments.

View final screens below ⇩