How might we…

… work with clients to unpack their pain points to solve business problems rapidly and curate unique customer experiences.

The Role

As an innovation designer on IBM’s Client Engineering team, I lead design thinking workshops with cross-functional teams of sellers and technical folks to uncover a client’s current processes, goals, and challenges. We synthesize those findings to define a project scope that provides our clients the maximum amount of value during a 4-6 week pilot. During our pilots, I work with the technical team to craft unique user experiences with Figma, test the usability of the minimum viable product through surveys or user interviews, and build presentations to tell the story of the improved process. Our tight timelines mean I must be agile, flexible, and efficient to keep the team on track and focused on the user. Our projects range from designing dashboard interfaces to developing risk assessment tools to using AI to build out virtual assistants. Our clients are from various industries, including banking, manufacturing, retail, insurance, and more.

Work from this role is confidential so the following use cases are anonymized and cannot include specific details of projects and use cases.

Conducting Design Thinking Workshops and User Interviews to Inform Design Decisions

A strategy consulting agency had six different use cases for implementing AI into their processes that they were interested in exploring. They didn’t know which use case to start with so I lead a design thinking workshop to talk about their goals, priorities, and pain points to uncover which use case would provide the most value in a short amount of time. Once we selected a use case, we created one journey map of their current process and another journey map to show how they imagine the process will be improved at the end of our pilot. Using design thinking to collect this information allowed us to empathize with the client and their user to ensure that our project contributes to their larger initiatives and solves real problems. It also helped us determine our success criteria and project plan. While building the pilot, we conducted interviews with the client’s subject matter experts to understand their users. This informed the order we put widgets and how we titled the graphs to ensure users could effectively use the dashboards. Our deliverables received excellent feedback from the client and resulted in a new partnership and a $30,000 software sale.

Using Storytelling to Communicate Value

An insurance provider had a complicated process for their business units to request data that included long wait times, an overworked data team, and resulted in missing deadlines and receiving fines. Our team created a virtual assistant with watsonx AI that allowed business users to self service and find information without requesting and waiting for the data team. To communicate the value of this updated process, I created storyboards of the current and future states of their process. This highlighted the frustrations in their original process and the improved user experience for both personas when using our virtual assistant. Our presentation received great feedback from our client’s executives and allowed us to breakthrough to the client in communicating the value of our solution.

Credentials

Throughout my time at IBM I have taken many courses to ensure that I am continuously up to date on the latest design and technology trends. Below are some relevant badges that I have earned: