Partner Plus Program

NPS scores and partner support feedback indicated that many felt the digital experience was complicated and didn’t understand the program structure or benefits to their business. Along with user journey work, we conducted a content audit and card sorting to further discover the user needs and inform our experience design strategy.

The challenges mainly around the following area:

Fragmented user experience

• Over 25 different nav menus makes it hard for the user to find what they need.

• Disparate experiences between ibm.com/partners, PartnerWorld, and Partner Portal.

Varying content uwnership

• 40k pages, large majority w/o visits.

• Business unit based content and Geo based content with varying degrees of ownership.

Outdated design

• Webpages built on V18 (non-Carbon) platform with inconsistency on visual treatments.

To provide partners with a clear path to key information and tasks such registration, incentives, and managing leads, we streamlined the experience. We achieved this through new information architecture and navigation validated by prototype testing. The new experience offered focused messaging, a conversational, guiding voice and tone, and consistent design patterns.

Delivering a new website that could scale globally required migrating content to a Salesforce platform and integrating design system components and patterns. And, establishing new, agile systems for content and design development was also beneficial. Examples included building user experience briefs, workflows for versioning and reviews, QA and optimization, and scaling the process across a worldwide team of practitioners and stakeholders.

Key focus areas:

Intuitive user experience

The IBM Business Partner website was radically simplified by reducing redundant and outdated content from 450,000 to 40 pages, and 25 separate navigation menus were identified, refined, and improved with clear wayfinding. 



Unified content ownership

An 8-person content review board and approval process is set in place to reinforce the governor of content publishing.

Modernized design with intention

Traffic and new partner registration conversion increased by 50% after launching a modernized site featuring the IBM Carbon Design System, new branding (IBM Partner Plus), and straightforward, compelling content.

Our strategic approach to addressing partner needs paid off and the new digital experience resonated with partners.

The impact was immediate, and we achieved measurable success across our digital properties: 


• 500,000 unique visitors

• 2,500 new Partner Plus members

• 50% increase in weekly visitors