IBM Automation Decision Services Earns “Olympic” Success
While athletes from around the world competed for a spot on the Olympic podium this past summer, IBM Design found international success of their own. After winning six prestigious awards in the past a few months, the design team behind IBM Automation Decision Services, available as part of the IBM Cloud Pak® for Business Automation, continues to be recognized for their strong commitment to user-centered design.
The team now boasts a medal table of record-breaking proportions, earning a Platinum Spark Design Award, an IF Design Award in the User Interface discipline for software and service, two Gold Indigo Awards in the Interactive Design and Digital Tools & Utilities category, a Silver Indigo Award in the UX, Interface & Navigation category, and a Bronze Indigo Award in the Apps category. This design team has demonstrated their ability to build exception user experiences which differentiates their product in the market.
Meet the design team
Our small design team, comprised of three designers distributed between Italy, Germany, and France, maintains our commitment to focus on our user and prioritize innovation. While working remotely, we have only been able to see each other through conferencing tools. One of our best solutions to stay connected has been to begin every morning with a virtual coffee.
This healthy habit was fundamental during the most difficult months of the lock down. We were able to support each other while our homes became our offices. Taking a few moments to share and reflect on what was happening all over the world provided a small valve of relief for everyone on the team.
A Rich Booty
Thinking about participating in design competitions was an exciting challenge and we faced it with the same determination and tenacity as athletes competing for the Olympics. Like Olympic athletes, we participated in daily training, gave a lot of sacrifice, and had high motivation to give the best version of ourselves to a jury in a highly competitive, international setting.
What was awarded?
Through our intense user research, we found that our customers were having a hard time with business decisions. Users were struggling to implement automation, organize their projects, understand the hierarchy of information, create diagrams, and change the way decisions are made and stay aligned with important requirements. We used this feedback to inform our brainstorming sessions as a design team. Through these insights we were able to design an experience which resulted in a better quality of life for our users. IBM Automation Decision Services automates business decisions and paves the way for code-less modeling.
It was about communicating the long path of renewal which started more than 4 years ago, first with IBM Decision Composer and now with IBM Automation Decision Services. We went to great lengths to explain the evolution of the product and the transformation of all the existing experiences. Despite the initial difficulties, it turned out to be an extraordinary success. Like all the Olympic athletes standing on that podium, our hard work has finally paid off and we were victorious.
The product’s intuitive interface allows business users to streamline a decision-making process which is normally long and complicated. While users typically spend lots amounts of time analyzing documents, extracting policies, and asking their IT department to change the rules in the application code, we have created a product to simplify this entire process.
We worked to ensure that non-technical users had all the information and guidance they needed to be successful. The clear, simple and compelling visual layout, example projects and instructive onboarding gives users a starting point and shows them how they can use these decisions to optimize their business.
Now business users are able to quickly adapt the way decisions are made based on ever-changing external conditions and can integrate their decision-making processes with predictions provided by artificial intelligence models (Watson Machine Learning).
Last but not least, we have also been internally awarded with Outstanding Technical Achievement Awards (OTAA) for delivering outstanding technical achievements that translate into tangible company-wide additions in the form of patent royalties or “applied” technology. We were nominated by leadership based on several criteria, including measurable business value, complexity, reusability, and impact on client satisfaction.
These achievements are excellent examples of the innovative and high-quality solutions our talented teams are bringing to IBM and our clients. Thank you for your hard work and continued success!
Arin Bhowmick
Vice President and Chief Design Officer
At the end of the day, winning is a team sport. This spectacular result should not only be attributed to the design team, but also to the offering managers, who know our product and our customers very well, and to the user interface development team, which made this product an indispensable core asset for corporate decision-making and automation.
Myriam Battelli is a visual designer at IBM based in Rome. The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.
