Red Hat Marketplace Account Creation

One of my most cherished experiences at IBM was working on the Red Hat Marketplace. This project sought to create a new open cloud marketplace for customers to find, try, and buy certified software for container-based environments in public clouds or on-prem.

My time with this team spanned the initial conceptual ideation process through to the general availability of the Red Hat Marketplace platform for IBM customers and beyond. The design group was a very senior and high performing team, providing me with opportunities to both learn from talented designers and mentor junior designers as well.

My initial design focus was to define the requirements for creating a Red Hat Marketplace account for both existing IBM customers and potential new clients in as few as steps as possible.

My Role

• Collaborate with product management and technical leadership to define requirements for creating and managing accounts

• Create all key user flows and initial mockups to build consensus around account creation flows

• Research and identify opportunities to limit friction during customer signup

• Lead iteration of early mockups through to delivery of all account creation and management design assets for implementation

Key Challenges Overcome

Account Creation research

• Extensive accounting of current IBM product account creation flows and competitor examples

• Recruitment and research sessions with key user persona of solution developers

• Identified critical opportunities to simplify sign-up and reduce abandonment during registration

• Collaborated with IBM legal to ensure only minimally required fields captured during registration

SimplIFied Account Creation

• Built executive buy-in to remove payment method as required step during account creation

  • No credit card required during sign-up

  • Payment only when purchasing software

• Limited authentication to only IBMid and Red Hat login to eliminate need to for team to manage user IDs and passwords as part of the platform

• Remove account verification with email by utilizing existing IBM and Red Hat logins

Example delivered sign-up flow designs

Delivering a Simplified Sign-Up Experience

The road to creating final designs for account registration on the Red Hat Marketplace was a textbook example of the value in designing for your intended users/personas. Providing a simple, quick sign-up experience was critical for success in launching a new marketplace platform.

Early initial indications from senior project leadership were that our team would follow competitors and other IBM products and require payment method during sign-up. However, my thorough research and user feedback helped guide the team to consider and eventually remove that roadblock and others from the experience. The result was a fast and simple sign up path limited to only selecting a country, entering email, authenticating, and accepting terms & conditions for new and current IBM customers. A new account could be created in less than 30 seconds.

To finalize this approach to account creation, I:

• Completed and presented research on target user experiences and expectations when creating an accounts

• Built alignment across the broader team and leadership on design strategy for account management on the platform

• Delivered all initial mockups, flows, and final designs to visual design and development