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Patrick Childress, Program Manager, Real-time events

David Stone, Creative Director, UX Lead

Karen Kersting, Creative Director, UX and Design

Tashira Gibbs, UX Director

Jeffrey Gottwald, UX Director

Wendy Diaz, Visual Designer

Kim King, UX Director

David Stone mentioned IBM uses Agile methodology to keep the design process flexible and dynamic.

They create Journey maps, in which the client is rarely the user.

They create Empathy maps with clients and the client’s end users; they study what the audience thinks, does, feels, and says.

They sometimes consider strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOP) for audience based on personas (imaginary users) they create to help them understand their goals.

Sponsor users are actual live members of an audience that IBM  brings into focus groups.

Designers present the sponsor users apps as as-is states for a given project. They look at how users prepare, plan, travel, and behave at a “destination.”

Then they find the users’ pain points in using the interface.

With that input, designers create playbacks to review and adjust what was just made. Then designers create “to-be states” with updated journey maps.

Paper prototyping

First design teams create flowcharts to show to clients and users.

Then they create wireframes (like flowcharts but with more detailed layouts than just rectangles showing the name of page).

Lastly, visual designers apply the look and feel.

At IBM, functional prototypes aren’t even created in many cases.

They do a lot of work for Apple | IBM enterprise: they create apps that are not “consumer facing,” (for end users) but “business facing” or business-to-business (B2B). Average consumers aren’t even aware enterprise apps even exist, but they are a huge part of what designers are paid to do.

Designers flesh out their personas by researching a sample day-in-the-life (DIL), in which they question audience members about all the circumstances leading up to, during, and after they use an interface to understand the context in which an app might be used.

The design team never goes straight to a solution. Instead they create low-fidelity prototypes, then later make high-fidelity prototypes.

The IBM team struggles to make single-purpose apps rather than “kitchen sink” apps, even though it’s common for clients to ask for extra capabilities.

Typically, they start with whiteboard sketches, not even on paper - in order to get non-specialists involved from the very beginning. Rather than a strict handing off of a job from back-end designer to front-end designer, they try to get the whole team involved immediately to share their insights.

David Stone recommends students looking at both the Human interface guideline for iOS and the User Interface Guidelines for Android.

He encourages you to think about why you like or dislike the apps you use.

If you want to know more about this subject, the GSU Library has "About Face" as an electronic book.