Project
At Open Liberty, I was able to greatly work a team of developers and technical people to contributed different website functionalitites across the website to improve the overall user experiences for the end users.
Goal
Project 1: Enhancing the mental model for Java developers searching Open Liberty documentation by providing deeper, more relevant search results and enabling
Project 2: Improve transparency by smoothly integrating a way for Open Liberty audiences to contribute to the website
Collaborators
Tamara (UX designer), Steve Sam Jacob (IBM Software Developer), Laura Cowen (IBM Technical Content Strategist), David (Technical Writer)
Result
Both projects are currently still in progress ;)
Knowledge Harvesting
Navigating the docs feels harder than it should be without search
To understand the current context of the Open Liberty website and pain-points, we delve into understanding centering user pain-points from the team
Navigating technical documentation, particularly for users who are not deeply familiar with the product or development concepts is difficult because the site search doesn't surface the right pages clearly when someone searches something like “user registry.”
A user might land on an auto-generated page when searching for a configuration element, only to find a short, two-sentence definition with no context, usage examples, or links to related content even though that information may exist elsewhere in a manually written section
Competitive Analysis
Evaluating Lunr.js Search Capabilities within Antora’s Static Site Limits
We found that Open Liberty faces a technical limitation due to its use of Antora,a static site generator. The challenge is that Antora handles page generation automatically, which makes it difficult to customize or modify individual pages as needed. To work around this, the current idea is to see frontend features that are technically feasible with Lunr.js to set the threshold of what the limtiations
User personas
Who are current Open Liberty users?
Knowing how experienced developers are with Open Liberty—or enterprise Java in general—helps us design better, more supportiveexperiences. It shows us how much of the product they’re able to use on their own, and where they might get stuck. This understanding helps us identify who our users really are—from complete beginners who need more guidance and simpler language, to advanced enterprise developers looking for deep technical resources. The gap between these groups is big, and their needs are very different.
