Consolidated cloud onboarding

A multi-release initiative to modernize IBM Cloud’s service onboarding by moving off a legacy tool and into a modern, scalable experience. This work unified previously fragmented workflows, improved compliance alignment, and created a path to retire aging infrastructure. This saved the platform an estimated ~$45K per month while resolving long-standing friction points for both service onboarding teams and pillar approvers.

Senior UX Designer, co-leading design

3 years (multi-phase migration)

2 product managers, 4 rotating UX designers, 6+ engineers, Ecosystem offering managers, Service Framework focals, Catalog management engineers

As a Senior UX Designer, I guided the UX for the unified onboarding experience. I documented existing workflows, aligned requirements with SMEs, and designed foundational patterns that include the dashboard, lifecycle approvals, IAM flows, navigation, and information architecture. I collaborated across offering management, research, SMEs, and engineering to ensure functional parity, improved usability, and a clear path to retiring the legacy tool.

When I joined the onboarding modernization effort, IBM Cloud’s onboarding experience was effectively split in half. First-party teams used an aging legacy tool tied to costly infrastructure, and third-party teams used a more modern system that was missing key functionality for certain product types. For years, product teams navigated these two worlds with little visibility of system status, confusing requirements, and outdated docs.

RMC and Partner Center before the redesign. Both UIs were using outdated design system assets.

The fragmentation was noticeable. New services stalled during approval cycles and teams struggled to understand what needed to happen next. And for some service owners, the onboarding process itself was intimidating enough to reconsider whether they wanted to publish on IBM Cloud at all:

IBM Cloud needed one unified onboarding experience that was modern, scalable, and aligned with compliance requirements. Most importantly, this needed to happen without disrupting the hundreds of services already running through the legacy tool.

Before we could make changes, we had to understand the ecosystem end-to-end. I partnered with another designer and our researcher to map the current workflows across both systems, pillar by pillar (”Pillars” are distinct subject areas within the service framework and have their own requirements and approvers). What quickly surfaced was the sheer diversity of requirements: IAM, security, billing, catalog management, ecosystem teams, and Service Framework approvers all had different needs for onboarding.

Pain points collected from several workshops and organized along an onboarding journey.

These early discoveries helped us see the real issues were systemic, involving the underlying workflows, data flows, and organizational processes that supported onboarding.

With the current state mapped, we defined the migration in phases by designing functionality in multiple releases. We started by enabling new platform services to onboard in the modern tool, then migrating billable services, then professional services, and eventually retiring the legacy tool entirely. I created a Gantt chart to give leadership visibility into the design team’s roadmap and to help sequence the engineering work.

Communicating our design process helped estimate a timeline we could communicate to our stakeholders.

This project had a large number of stakeholders with their own unique pain points and requirements for sign-off.

Regular collaborative working sessions allowed us to co-create with our architects and deepen our understanding of the system we were designing.

From there, my design work centered around foundational UX patterns:

The checklist and lifecycle approvals

Users repeatedly told us they struggled to understand their approval status or maturity level. We redesigned the checklist to make system status, remaining work, and required documentation more clear.

Showing progress for each maturity level helped users understand why some approvals were reset. The previous design left users confused when an approval they already received was reset.

Dashboard and navigation

The new dashboard surfaced next steps, blockers, and important system data that was previously buried. The previous information architecture prevented the platform from scaling. We reorganized the experience to support new service types, workflows, and future enhancements.

Updated dashboard and navigation helping guide the user to incomplete taks.

To validate the new direction, we created hi-fi prototypes that covered a full range of scenarios. Testing revealed dramatic improvements in clarity and efficiency:

Usability testing was conducted in several rounds with pain points and opportunities being tracked as issues in our team's GitHub repo.

We iterated based on feedback, refined copy and state handling, and resolved edge cases as development progressed. Once the legacy tool was fully retired, the team was finally free to deliver net-new onboarding capabilities without rebuilding them twice.

The updated codebase allowed us to quickly ship small usability improvements. For example, fixing an issue where users couldn’t remove a role if it was the only role for an action would have previously required a prohibitively time-intensive change.

The consolidated onboarding experience is now the single path for bringing new platform services to IBM Cloud. Retiring the legacy tool also retired the last remaining workloads on costly infrastructure— unlocking ~$45K in monthly savings for the platform.

Teams now have a shared experience for onboarding. The UI is aligned with the latest IBM design system and UI patterns. Pain points that had existed for years were finally resolved. And onboarding itself is faster, more visible, and far easier for new teams to adopt.

One quote captured the shift best: