Built on Experience: IBM Design at Data and AI Forum
IBM Design puts a focus on users at the Data and AI Forum in Miami

A few weeks ago (Oct 21–24, 2019), IBM took over the Intercontinental hotel in Downtown Miami for the IBM Data and AI Forum, which showcased the latest and greatest from our Data and AI portfolio. Customers and business partners, across many roles and industries were in attendance as they learned how they can drive smarter decisions, formulate more effective strategies, and achieve better business outcomes with analytics, data and AI.
With so many users in the venue, IBM Design seized the opportunity to not only meet members of our growing community, but also to learn more about them. From keynotes to product demos, design workshops, and interactive activities, IBM Design focused on the importance of user feedback in our design process.
User powered community

To kick off the conference, I was invited by the IBM Community Team, alongside a few of my designers to welcome everybody during Community Day. We talked about IBM’s long-standing commitment to human-centered design, our approach to enterprise design thinking, and shared a few stories of how users have helped us close the gap between our design assumptions and reality. Dillon Eversman gave a sneak peek of AutoAI (more to come on this later) and Reena Ganga enchanted the audience with an experience around Immersive Data that showed how her team is enabling users to discover insights beyond data visualizations; insights that literally jump off the screen using AR/VR technologies. Design researcher Lucy Obus and design strategist Lisa Marie Chen, closed the keynote by sharing how user research fuels design innovation. They also invited the audience to become design partners through our User Experience Program — individuals who actively work with our product design teams to help us build great product experiences.

Design workshops
With more than 1,700 people from 43 countries in attendance, the conference was a melting pot of diverse perspectives and experiences. As always, IBM Design capitalized on the opportunity to draw insights from customers and business partners by holding a series of design workshops and interactive sessions.
Understanding the AI application life-cycle helps the design team create products that truly address the customer’s end-to-end journey. One design thinking session aimed to gather more information about this user journey, by capturing participants’ as-is data science workflow, identifying key pain points, and developing big ideas in response to the pain points and opportunities.

During another hands-on lab, designers taught participants how to build a virtual assistant using Watson Assistant. Using an out-of-the-box virtual assistant, appeals to both smaller clients, who perhaps don’t have the technical skills in house to build their own, but also to larger clients who want a solution available quickly. In the hands-on lab we ran, the majority of participants had never built a virtual assistant before, so our designers discussed best practices for conversational design, and touched on some of the standard UX patterns to follow while building.

Meanwhile, the IBM Cloud Pak for Data hands-on session drew a full house and included participants with varied roles such as data scientists, data engineers, and C-Suite executives. The diverse group enabled the design team to uncover substantive UX and UI feedback through ethnography, surveys, and live polls. General consensus showed participants appreciated IBM Cloud Pak for Data’s clean and simple presentation, and would prefer it over their current tools.

If there’s one surefire sign that IBM takes design seriously, it’s that design routinely shares time on the main stage at these events. In Miami, not one, but two designers joined General Manager of IBM Data & AI, Rob Thomas, during the main keynote to showcase the work our team is doing. UX Designer Dillon Eversman demonstrated AutoAI innovations, an experience that helps customers accelerate the path to AI.

Meanwhile, AI Transformation Design Director Jennifer Sukis shared the story of iKure, a health tech company in India. iKure used Cloud Pak for Data to create and monitor an AI model that enables them to diagnose and treat heart disease. Jennifer walked through the entire ladder to AI through this story, and demonstrated the end-to-end experience using Cloud Pak for Data.

The Building Blocks of AI: uncovering AI opportunities one brick at a time
Beyond the talks and workshops, IBM Design returned to the main expo hall with another Design Immersive featuring a 12-foot Lego wall called “The Building Blocks of AI.” To better understand our customers’ journey to AI, the team sought to create an activity that would investigate what people would like to use AI for, and how far along that journey they currently are. Organizing the data by industry, customers plotted their journey on the wall using Lego bricks as they discussed their ideal use case and what might be getting in their way from achieving it.

Our Lego wall was a big hit with customers, business partners, and even other IBMers, who found the activity to be a great conversation starter about how we might use AI to solve business problems. The activity was also an example of how we use different design thinking techniques to co-create and learn from our users to deepen our understanding.
Over 700 people contributed to our wall, and the data is currently being explored by our in-house data scientists to find insights to bring back to the team.

Just a few steps away from the wall was our Lego Lounge where participants could sign up to join our User Experience Program as sponsor users. If you’re interested in signing up for the program and co-creating with us, you can learn more at: http://ibm.biz/userexperience.
Next chapter
All in all, it’s fair to say that the Miami Data and AI Forum was a tremendous success. The enthusiasm and engagement of the attendees was palpable, and their willingness to provide detailed feedback on our products was invaluable to the design team. Design is inherently a user-centered mindset, so having the opportunity to interact with so many customers and business partners, from across the globe is critical to the success of our designers. The team came away armed with insights to be able to focus on the details that would make our products even better, and we can’t wait to share the latest and greatest at the next Data and AI forum.
A special thank you to my colleagues Lisa Chen, and Reena Ganga for sharing their experiences and perspectives from the Data and AI Forum.
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.

