ibm_projects

TL;DR:

I got to work on pretty complex technical & enterprise products and was lucky to learn a lot from the collective experience of our huge IBM design family. A big part of my job was facilitating workshops for cross-functional teams and becoming a catalyst for co-creation. I had to juggle a range of demands from sellers, partners, ecosystem requirements, legacy issues, network effects, technical constraints, and business goals while being the user's voice. The joys of working in Enterprise design!

IBM Cloud Pak for Integration

A toolkit for all enterprise integration needs.

The IBM Cloud Pak for Integration brings all products in IBM’s integration portfolio as one unified & seamless experience. It spans API lifecycle management, application integration, enterprise messaging, event streams, and high speed data transfer. As part of a 20+ international team of designers from various products in IBM's integration portfolio, I represented Aspera (IBM’s high speed transfer service) in the Cloud Pak.

In addition to facilitating and driving design thinking workshops with product & engineering teams to identify goals, personas, use cases, and user stories, I was contributing to design principles, concepts , and components for the Cloud Pak's core experience.

IBM Aspera on Cloud

High speed file transfer SaaS service for sending and sharing files of any size and type across a hybrid cloud environment.

Transitioning from one app to a platform

With the vision of bringing the best of Aspera's high-speed data transfer capabilities to the cloud, we set out to transform the legacy ‘Aspera Files’ app into a platform. This new platform, called IBM Aspera on Cloud would have 4 applications, two of which were still in the early stages of planning. My job was to design a scalable and easily relatable conceptual model and information architecture for the admin interface.

Everything from inheritance models, settings, roles, permissions at multiple levels to managing users, and resources had to rethought and designed. And did I mention that we had to be backward compatible, ensure parity, and the core APIs couldn't be tweaked much!

Two months after its launch, over 400 customers and ~ 25K users had successfully migrated to the new SaaS offering.

Data-informed design practice

I teamed up with our UXR to drive and operationalize a data- informed design practice. Our go-to tools were Redash for backend databases, Amplitude for behavior analytics and Walk-me for session playbacks.

From vetting a design ticket to measuring the impact of the design, we tried to leverage user behavior analytics and data from our product backend databases to inform our design decisions and research.

We started a pilot to integrate 'data-questions' in our Jira workflow for designers to request data or metrics related to the ticket. This could also be used as a benchmark to measure and document impact. One of our long term goals was to create a pipeline that combines the different data sources and bring down the barrier to access by using visual tools like Tableau or IBM Cognos

IBM Aspera Analytics

Aspera Analytics is a beta cloud-based tool for analytics, visualization, and reporting of file transfer logs

I designed mid-fidelity data visualizations to troubleshoot file transfer performance, analyze content, and view transfer summary statistics.

During my 3 month internship, I worked very closely with engineering and product teams to identify personas, their familiarity with data visualizations, common use cases, and technical restrictions. My work laid the foundation for the development of a visual troubleshooting tool at Aspera and later, evolved into the Activity app in IBM Aspera on Cloud. I was offered a full-time position based on my performance.