What I learned about UX Research as a Design Intern at IBM

Looking into the research process and key takeaways from my internship

In the Summer of 2018, I interned as a UX Designer at IBM Canada’s Toronto studio, working on the Business Analytics (BA) team. As a designer with a strong interest in branding, I was excited to be working on the BA design system. Design systems used properly are meant to maintain a consistent user experience throughout the product. They improve workflow efficiency, as product teams can refer to the system to ensure proper look and implementation of each component.

Problem

The suboptimal user experience of the BA UI toolkit website was preventing the team from achieving maximum workflow efficiency.

Research Goals

The purpose of this research was to examine how users incorporate the BA UI Toolkit into their daily workflow and to understand their pain points with the website. I worked alongside a UX Researcher and UX Designer on the Toolkit team to conduct this research project. Through identifying areas of weakness in the design system and the site itself, our goals were:

• To gain feedback from our users (BA design + development)
• To identify areas of weakness in the…