Design process

Workshop to define goals

The project kicked off with a design-facilitated workshop, bringing together various teams in a single location. Together, representatives from engineering, product management and design generated user stories, empathy maps and journey maps. This approach helped us identify and align as a group on parallels in the product functionality and target use cases.

Collaborative visioning

Next, Design helped everyone step back from what's existing already, towards a vision of what's possible. Multiple rounds of visioning using sketches and storytelling helped us facilitate this. The first round was blue sky ideation for 4 days, to reset possibilities.

Produce concept

I took the ideas from the visioning sessions and boiled it down to something more realistic, and that told a story. It came to life in the form of a concept car (a design technique borrowed from the auto industry) that tells the story of how we can solve a customer’s problem, without getting hung up on technical constraints. With each iteration of the concept car, we shared with stakeholders and evaluated the concepts with users.

Partner on E2E epic creation

Design paired with product management and development to write all epics from a user-centered point of view, instead of falling back into the habit of creating feature-based epics. The squads were revamped to drive “end-to-end” objectives and deliverables. They each owned a piece of the user experience in its entirety which covers all layers of the product stack.

Collaborative flowcharts

Next, I led the team in collaborative flowchart sessions, which were instrumental in shifting the team's mindset to think about user needs first. This helped us facilitate conversations around system behavior and constraints. And enabled us to establish common ground on a path for these high level concepts to come to reality.

Define an MVE

Our design team always pushes for an MVE (minimum valuable experience) rather than an MVP. With an MVE, the focus is shifted from features to the user’s experience. We sliced the story map in a thin, horizontal way that would enable a user to achieve their end goal, without going too deep in any one area.

Design wireframes

Now that we had the MVE flow laid our for our user, it was time to start breaking down the experience further to solve more specific interaction problems. More design team members joined us to jump in and iterate on bringing small pieces of the flow to life by building wireframes.

Validate user experience

We paired with design research to conduct a series of user research sessions with a cross-section of existing customers to validate new concepts for their needs.

Any issues or gaps identified through either of the above mentioned avenues were triaged together with other technical issues being sorted out for the release. This ensured that we not only had a documented design debt backlog for future, but also that user experience was given an equal weight and priority in the software development lifecycle on the team.

Oversee final UI design

I worked with several designers to undertake the massive effort to design the visual and motion design needed for a complicated and UI-heavy product. At this time, IBM was releasing a revamped design language that we implemented into the new Watson Discovery. We were the first product to GA in the IBM Data and AI division utilizing the new design language, becoming an example for the rest of the products to follow.