Open Liberty website built on developers intent
10 min read
MAIN ROLE
UX Accelerate to Design Intern contributer
COLLABORATORS
5 engineers, 1 product designer (my manager), product manager
DURATION
May - August 2025
I was selected as top 5% to particpate in IBM Accelerate for the design track. During the time, I was able to collaborate on interactive enterprise design thinking mini projects and sessions with IBM designers, fellow peers, and leaders.
After the program ended, I was selected to work on open source project with IBM Open Liberty Team. Below are the various project we worked on.
The goal
A search experience that allow developers find documentation more productivity without unnecessary scanning, guesswork, or context switching.
The problem
However, the current Open Liberty documentation architecture isn't optimized for that.
Our no-brainer solution
A search capability that helps developers find as they search simultaneously
we proposed a lightweight integration of search into the existing Open Liberty platform, designed to return keyword-focused results that are fast to read and easy to understand.
Our ideal solution
Beside the fast integration design, we proposed an ideal verison aids users refine their searches more precisely specifically without typing the whole context.
Knowledge harvesting
To understand the current context of the Open Liberty website and pain-points, we delve into understanding centering user pain-points from the team. Below are some key findings…
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.
Current filter or google search doesn't surface the right one sometimes due to the gap between auto-generated doc and manual written ones
Competitive Analysis & working within tech constraint
Evaluating Lunr.js Search Capabilities within Antora’s Static Site Limits with feasible frontend feature
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.
User personas + use cases
From beginner level to advanced enterprise java developers and their use cases
Building a supportitive and inclusive experience means understanding that beginner level developers more guidance and simpler language, While advanced enterprise developers looking for deep technical resources. The gap between these groups is big, and their needs are different.
Journey mapping -> identifying derperate moments
We audited how users navigate the document search within the current website limitations, focusing specifically on the filter and navigation menu interactions
Design iterations of different verisons
Notable explorations in design from first pass design to future implementation
Through testing, we were able to identify that most users prefer to be allowed to explore the content step by step rather than being bombarded with too much information at once. The winner design allows users to search key words and the result will popup the direct documentation of those words in each of the documentation filtered by relevance that appears in higher hierarchy. The second design uses subtitle to search more preciesly for cross-referencing.
A key piece of feedbacks came from our project manager and lead developer, who believes this design is the most technically feasible from our Luna.js web standpoint.
Future design vision: Personalized Open Liberty AI chatbot
While envisioning for a future recommendation, we create an vision of an AI chatbot for the developers. The chatbot provides instant responses, allowing users to quickly get answers without waiting for manual searches or browsing.
Final reflection
While a search bar may seem simple to design, this project revealed the deeper complexity of working within Open Liberty’s existing site architecture. It strengthened my ability to design within technical constraints and collaborate closely with engineering.
