Design Intern @ IBM

Design Intern @ IBM

Summer 2022

Projects

Shadowed Designer

I shadowed a full time Designer on a project with a large energy and gas company who wanted to integrate IBM Maximo. I attended client meetings and helped to capture information on the Mural board, created MURAL boards for workshops over Zoom, and learned how quick a project may need to pivot in order to fit the clients needs during workshop meetings.

Playbook for Client Engineering Organization within IBM

Summary: Created MVP for a playbook, a guide for client engineering teams to use as they go through IBM Enterprise Design Thinking methodologies with clients

Role: Lead designer

Tools: Mural, Figma, Workshop Facilitation

Team: Designers, Engineers, Data Scientists

Discovery

The design interns were onboarded to a project in which the team already had an idea of WHAT they wanted to create. It was a Client Engineering Playbook. A website which IBMer’s can utilize as they work with a client through the Client Engineering methodology. The methodology had 4 stages (Framing, Discovery, Scoping, Solutioning) to create a MVP. The playbook would have predefined questions for each stage to help IBMer’s through a client engagement.

We were given a general idea of what we wanted to create. But besides that us designers had to create a UI for the playbook. As interns we had just been at IBM for a month. That’s why the first step was to learn about the current process that IBMer’s use for a typical client engagement before we could start.

Insights

From our research, we created a persona named John, a technology engineer.

We learned that currently teams use Mural boards for each stage which has the prompts and questions. Through this insight, we decided to implement Mural into the Playbook. That way the playbook can be linked with Mural and teams can have access to both.

Problem Statement

John needs a way to better understand and incorporate the value engineering process because he doesn’t know what questions to ask, and this would help improve the quality of his future engagements and give him more value.

Research Question

How can John better understand a client’s needs and frame questions while using Value Engineering Methodology?

Use Cases

  • Create a playbook
  • Edit existing team playbooks
  • Search for past clients engagements
  • User wants to view the playbook the team is working on

MVP Creation

Firstly, I defined the most needed features we needed to test for the MVP. I facilitated a scoping workshop with the team in order to find the features we needed.

Our two major goals for the MVP were to incorporate an intuitive user experience that was seamless and secondly provide integration with Mural.

Usability Testing

Once we created the prototype, we set out to prove the intuitiveness and usability of the playbook application through usability testing.

Top Achievements

  1. Pitched MVP to senior management
  2. Utilized Enterprise Design Thinking and the Client Engineering Methodology
  3. Created a MVP of the playbook in Figma
  4. Tested with our users.

IBM Accomplishments

Created engaging, authentic, and functional user experiences and web application interfaces using Figma for Client Engineering teams
Designed a customer care experience using Watson assistant to improve customer service
Led framing, discovery, solutioning workshops using Mural to uncover MVP in a short span of time
Created prototypes and utilized insights from user studies to refine the user experience
Collaborated effectively with several business consultants, designers, engineers, and data scientists to reach technically feasible solution