“I had the distinct pleasure of working with Ami while consulting on Watson Workspace. I choose to work on this effort because it represented an opportunity unlike any other in IBM, to market and deliver a consumer-facing SaaS offering with a team that wanted to do it right, even if that meant redefining long established practices. It was obvious from the onset that Ami and her team were the masterminds behind not only the design of Watson Workspace and Watson Work Services, but were also responsible for deriving a differentiated business strategy for this transformational effort. This offering had been born from understanding user needs and continually reinforced by a user-centric design process.”
David Jaye, CMO, The Weather Company
IBM Connections has a legacy of having ignited the social business movement. It’s known for being feature rich, but even still, users were gravitating to modern SaaS offerings in an era where a bottoms-up groundswell and “Bring your own collaboration tool” was driving purchasing decisions. My team and I took a clean slate approach, performing extensive user research, identifying core UX principles, defining a set of persona archetypes and become intimately familiar with the current competitive landscape.
Reaching the conclusion that simply redesigning the existing experience would not address current business challenges, we pivoted to design an entirely new conversation-centric experience optimized for small team collaboration – delivering Watson Workspace, a brand new cross-device app + Watson Work Services, the underlying platform that is enabling a growing set of solutions to solve everyday business scenarios.
https://workspace.ibm.com
Client
IBM Collaboration Solutions
Date
2017-2018
Defined a set of persona archetypes that reflected team member attributes.
Identified core design principles.
Evolved team culture to ensure alignment across development, offering team and design
Mapped a holistic end-to-end experience for each outcome.
Explored many different visual concepts
To ensure users’ expectations were met with our product, we designed multiple internal and external channels to support users and collect feedback. Every capability in Watson Workspace was instrumented to collect metrics and we regularly analyzed feedback recevied through in-app NPS intercepts. Designing and developing in the open garnered our team real-time input from thousands of users that was incorporated directly back into our designs. This design-led work ultimately resulted in three brand new GA offerings for IBM and was the catalyst for cultural change including, a brand new business unit, a cutting edge development framework – built from the ground up, a very agile design and development process with IBM Design Thinking at the forefront, as well has been the driving force behind modern approaches to marketing, sales, services and support.
Watson Workspace web & desktop app interface.
Watson Workspace iOS App
Watson Workspace Android App
Marketing landing page for Watson Workspace
Watson Workspace Internal Adoption Site
Watson Workspace Help Center
Watson Workspace Blog on Medium