Design for Enterprise Software Gains Further Recognition
IBM Hybrid Cloud wins three 2018 A’Design Awards for its cloud products
The IBM Hybrid Cloud team is thrilled to announce that we have won three awards for our products in the 2018 A’ Design Award & Competition for the Information Technologies Design category. We received a A’Design Gold Award for IBM Bluemix Availability Monitoring and IBM Cloud Event Management as well as the A’Design Silver Award for IBM Entity Insights (MDM) . I’m pleased to add this to a number of achievements for IBM Design in this past year.
About A’ Design Award & Competition
The A’ Design Award & Competition, the world’s largest and most inclusive international design award, announced results of the 2017–2018 design competition: 1,962 Winners from 100 countries in 99 different design disciplines. Entries were carefully evaluated by an influential jury panel composed of established scholars, prominent press members, creative design professionals and experienced entrepreneurs.
The A’ Design Award & Competition highlights products that demonstrate superior design, technology and creativity, and encourages designers worldwide to create better work. The A’ Design Award is a symbol of excellence in design and innovation.
The Winning Cloud Products
The three winning products are all designed uniquely for their user base, and each design team had to overcome their own challenges in figuring out how to tailor the user experience of the software.
I want to offer some insights into the designs behind each product.
IBM Cloud Availability Monitoring
IBM Bluemix Availability Monitoring (BAM) is a Cloud-based service that lets developers easily monitor the health and performance of their applications. Traditional application monitoring tools force developers to undergo tedious configuration steps and tackle a high learning curve, costing time and money. This is why BAM is designed to easily integrate into existing developer processes and help them monitor their application’s performance with minimal fuss.
A big challenge with BAM was to create an app that seamlessly integrated with the existing workflow and tools that developers already used. One of the greatest goals for the design team was to have a low barrier to entry into using the product so that it was easy for new users to adapt it into their routines. Therefore easy setup and integration, while maintaining high quality design, was key to creating BAM.
BAM was designed with an iterative approach that was heavily based on user feedback. In order to build a tool that directly addressed user needs, developers were interviewed in order to understand their workflow and pain points. With every iteration, user testing methods such as sponsor user sessions and usability studies were used to gain feedback from the target users, so that each version was closer to the actual user needs.
The award provides some external validation of the great, and difficult, work that the design, dev and management teams did to bring BAM from idea to reality in a short timespan. More than recognition for the user experience and design we delivered, I see the award as proof of the power of working with cross-discipline teams committed to Design Thinking as the way to understand our user’s needs and help them achieve their goals. — Esteban Pèrez-Hemminger, Design Lead
IBM Cloud Event Management
IBM Cloud Event Management (CEM) helps IT Ops teams identify, diagnose, and resolve service outages. CEM features an intuitive workflow that integrates tasks for IT teams that are normally spread across different systems and users. CEM correlates, prioritizes, and routes data from thousands of sources to the right people. The app features built-in procedures to fix problems quickly, and allows teams to collaborate and stay in sync.
Designing for CEM posed a research challenge in developing the target user base. The initial designs were for an IT Operator who had few IT skills, and little understanding of what she or he worked on beyond following protocols and documented procedures. After testing this user base, the design team determined that some operators had over 20 years’ experience on the job, had developed extensive skills and were highly autonomous. The team modified what had been previously a very tight workflow, where users did a simple review of issues and quickly passed them on to engineering teams.
The changes allowed an operator to dive into details of an incident, and view more of its complexity for isolation and diagnosis. Beyond that, experienced and skilled operators had the opportunity to access the raw data that was received from the monitored apps and services that generated the incident so that they can apply their in-depth knowledge to diagnosing the underlying fault.
“I am delighted that our team has been recognized for its strong user-centered approach to designing a new IBM offering that will help our clients take the next step in their IT Ops transformation.” — Angela Boodoo, Design Lead
IBM Entity Insight
IBM Entity Insight (MDM) was designed with non-technical users’ needs in mind. Securely granting access to customer master data within corporations is often a difficult, lengthy and highly technical process, and not everyone can have access due to security and data-integrity concerns. Entity Insight enables users faster access and quicker analysis of these data sets, so that users can make the connections they need much faster.
The user experience vision and strategy for Entity Insight was built from the ground up using IBM Design Thinking in a highly collaborative process that included representatives from Design, Engineering, Offering Management, and Sales. The team conducted extensive user research, including stakeholder interviews to discuss differing thoughts and opinions about the user groups they were targeting, and what the product was meant to do. With these research methods the team worked together to align on a common understanding and design goals. From there, the team recruited more non-technical analysts to conduct interviews and design activities to further build on our understanding of the problem space.
“By closely integrating a dedicated design team into the development process and client engagement team, we’re making the right kind of impressions on our clients and users, and illuminating the significance of Design in the overall process. The A’ Design Award is further credit to IBM’s investment in a user-centric product vision.” — Amanda Pasquali, Design Lead
Why is Design Important?
Today, we are seeing more and more of an emerging focus on user experience in enterprise software, a field that has been often considered dry and certainly not the poster child of intuitive user experiences. What is most exciting here is that as design continues to gain a bigger role in our software, the focus also shifts more on the user, urging us to really consider how the technology impacts the people that use it. A focusing on the user in design work allows designers, as well as engineers and stakeholders foster a sense of empathy for those around them. User experience is not just a skill or a craft, but it promotes a mindset of considering if what we’re creating is actually contributing something to the world.
I’m excited to see IBM Hybrid Cloud continue its winning spree of international design awards for our products. This is the second win for us this year, alongside the 2018 IF Design Awards, as well as the Red Dot Award and Spark Award in 2017. I look forward to seeing more positive changes and recognition for enterprise software as we continue to design at scale.
Awardees:
IBM Bluemix Availability Monitoring
- Design Manager: Sandra Tipton
- Design Lead: Esteban Pérez-Hemminger
- Design Team: Troy Bjerke, Jamie Skinner, Lauren Goldstein, Natalie Caudell
IBM Cloud Event Management
- Design Manager: Sandra Tipton
- Design Lead: Angela Boodoo
- Design Team: Kieran Geoghegan, Daniel Brown, Britta Binning, Fabienne Schoeman, Shaun Lynch, Dave Clark, Myriam Battelli, Randa Salem
IBM Entity Insights
- Design Manager: Chad Amon
- Design Lead: Amanda Pasquali
- Design Team: Rene Rodriguez, Dominick Washburn, Laura Walks, Ruben Fernandez and Meghan Corbett
Arin Bhowmick (@arinbhowmick) is Vice President, Design at IBM based in San Francisco, California. The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.
