I survived Patterns: IBM’s Design Education program
A 6-week journey into Enterprise Design Thinking
“You have to try the barbecue there!”
This was the first thought that came to mind when I found out that I would be flying down to Austin, Texas this summer. I had been invited to attend Patterns, IBM’s six-week Design Education Program for early-career designers. Following my internship last summer, I have returned full-time to IBM as a User Experience designer. I had no clue what to expect from this training program, formerly known as “Bootcamp”. Sounded pretty intense.
The journey begins
On my first day, I walked on to IBM’s Austin campus with a small crowd of curious individuals, who I would soon get to know as my new colleagues. We made our way up to the 7th floor of the design studio, which would be our home for the next six weeks. After a round of icebreakers, we warmed up to each other pretty quickly and 56 strangers soon became friends.
A range of design disciplines were represented amongst our cohort. Most were new grads fresh out of school while others were transitioning from other career paths. All from different ends of the world with very interesting stories to tell.
Enterprise Design Thinking
In the first week, we jumped right into learning sessions on topics ranging from Carbon (IBM’s design system) to career talks given by senior designers on various topics including discipline growth, soft skills, and IBM as a business.
The lecture-style education provided us with a strong foundation to begin practicing design at IBM. At the heart of the design culture at IBM is Enterprise Design Thinking (EDT), a framework that scales design thinking across teams of all sizes and geographies. Each day was scheduled to teach us a few of the EDT activities. These workshops equipped us with the necessary tools to progress through our incubator project, which I will go into more detail later on.
At the core, Enterprise Design Thinking has three main principles that have given me a deeper appreciation for what it means to be a designer and a better understanding of how to be successful in a large organization.
1. A focus on user outcomes
As designers, we need to remember that we are not our users. Human-centered design requires us to empathize with our users. Understand them as real people with hopes and fears, values and behaviours. When we shift our focus from features and functions to user needs and outcomes, we inherently design more useful, usable and thoughtful solutions that gain the trust of our customers.
2. Restless reinvention
The Loop is a great representation of how working in an Agile team through iterative cycles can help teams achieve the best outcomes by gathering feedback from real users and improving upon each iteration.
As much as we would like to achieve perfection, nothing will ever be perfect. But we can commit to an idea, knowing that with each iteration, we can get a little closer to meeting our users’ continuously evolving needs.
3. Diverse Empowered Teams
Achieving user outcomes is just as important as knowing how to work in teams in order to design for those outcomes. With an emphasis on diversity and empowerment, each person brings a unique perspective to the table and has the expertise and authority to do whatever it takes to achieve the desired outcome. We need to be inclusive of people of all different backgrounds and work through conflict by listening to each other. As Distinguished Designer Douglas Powell said to us: “Empathy: first for each other, then for our users.”
The Incubator Project
The remaining five weeks of the program were spent using the knowledge and skillsets that we learned to work on an “Incubator” project. These team projects were sponsored by actual IBM teams ranging from Accessibility to Blockchain to IBM Cloud and many more.
My team’s project was sponsored by IBM’s Accessibility team, based here in Austin. We were given a Hill that prompted us to create a way to increase adoption of accessibility in design at IBM. Here is a quick overview of our process, from start to finish.
Week 1: Discovery
My team and I dove into online resources and learning modules through IBM’s learning hub to gain domain knowledge on Accessibility. Turns out, we didn’t know as much as we thought we did.
We created a research plan to answer some of our pressing questions and validate our assumptions. This was essential for us to move forward, as our problem left a fair bit of ambiguity.
Then, we set up interviews with our sponsor users, which consisted of IBM designers with varying knowledge on accessibility. Our goal was to understand how designers currently incorporate accessibility into their workflow and what challenges they were facing.
Week 2: Understanding
After synthesizing our research findings, we created an As-Is Scenario Map to align on how accessibility is currently being brought up within the product life cycle. By having a visual timeline to reference, we were able to identify gaps in the cycle where we could potentially introduce a solution.
Our next step was a Big Ideas Vignette exercise, used to begin the ideation phase. Much of our confusion had been cleared up from the research, and thus, our creative juices were starting to flow. The point of the exercise was to go crazy with our ideas and eventually scale them back to be more realistic.
Week 3: Pivot
Time was flying by and we had reached the half way point of the program. This week, we refined our first proposal:
A process improvement solution to ensure that accessibility is built into the product throughout the entire product life cycle.
Unexpectedly, we were blocked by our sponsoring team, as there was misalignment on the deliverable expectations. What they wanted from us was a tool that could be built and used by designers, rather than a “big picture” solution. Our proposal was rejected and we were back to the drawing board with one week left to work. It was crunch time.
Week 4: Prototyping
This was our final full week of working, so we jumped right back into it with another round of Big Ideas.
From our As-Is Scenario Map of the product life cycle, we identified a gap between design and development during the design handoff. Development wasn’t receiving proper requirements for accessibility (such as proper tab order, detailed image alt text, focus state specifications, etc.) with the designs.
This discovery led us to create our second proposal, which addresses some key pain points from our As-Is scenario. As this solution is still a work in progress, I won’t be going into further detail about the specifics.
Week 5: Playback
In our final week, we wrapped up our project and gave our final playback to the Accessibility Team, IBM Design leaders, and our fellow Patternites. We incorporated a storytelling aspect to showcase our solution and help our stakeholders build empathy with our persona, Claudia. After all was said and done, we received positive feedback from our sponsor team and I felt like all of our hard work had paid off.
Lessons learned
Align on expectations
A big learning point for me was to align on expectations with your stakeholders, including your teammates, before starting any work. Playbacks are a great way to maintain alignment throughout a project. Due to a misalignment, my team had to rework our ideas and come up with a new solution in a very short amount of time, which leads to my second learning point…
Keep moving forward
After our first proposal was rejected, we faced a roadblock and had no choice but to rework our solution. Instead of taking it personally or giving up, we took what we had learned thus far and used that knowledge to inform our next idea. From then on, it was smooth sailing.
Key takeaways
Aside from working on a project that has the potential to impact millions of people, I am so glad that I had the opportunity to form new friendships and connections with designers from all around the world. This experience opened my eyes as to how global IBM Design truly is, bringing thousands of people together to connect over a common passion.
And lastly, I have to admit that the barbecue in Austin is pretty damn good, but the real star of the show for me was Torchy’s Tacos!
Now, returning to my home studio in Toronto, I feel much more confident in my abilities as a new-hire designer at IBM.
Imposter syndrome was starting to creep up on me, but going through Patterns with 55 other people in the same position as I am really made me feel like I am not alone in this journey. I was able to practice leading design thinking sessions, give playbacks to senior designers and executives, and collaborate in a multidisciplinary team.
Moving forward, I am excited to apply my newfound skills to this job that I love and can’t be happy enough that I survived Patterns.
Interested in IBM Design? Learn more about IBM’s journey to adopt Enterprise Design Thinking.
The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.
Thanks for reading!
Be sure to SUBSCRIBE to never miss another article on UX design, career tips, life lessons, and more!
Here are a few more to read next:
