IBM Cloud Wins in the 2019 Indigo Design Awards
IBM Cloud is recognized in design for several of its products
The IBM Cloud, Data and AI design team is excited to announce that several of our products have been recognized in the 2019 Indigo Design Awards. IBM Immersive Data, IBM Open Liberty, IBM Event Streams, and IBM Agile Service Manager have been awarded gold, silver, and bronze medals in different categories. We are so excited to be honored by these awards and are grateful that our hard work is being recognized.
- IBM Immersive Data — Gold in UX, Interface & Navigation;
Silver in Interactive Design - IBM Open Liberty — Bronze in UX, Interface & Navigation; Bronze in Branding
- IBM Event Streams — Silver in UX, Interface & Navigation;
Bronze in Interactive Design - IBM Agile Service Manager — Silver in Digital Tools and Utilities;
Bronze in UX, Interface & Navigation
The Indigo Design Awards is an annual worldwide design competition. They accepted hundreds of entries this year, resulting in an intense and competitive judging process. The Indigo Design Awards value a passion for the extraordinary, and look for exceptional design projects with fresh takes on elements like composition and layout.
IBM Immersive Data
IBM Immersive Data is a data exploration tool that uses AR technology to advance the way users explore their data and communicate findings. By viewing their data in 3D, users can identify key patterns, relationships, and outliers faster than ever. This is one of the first projects to be exploring the AR space for data and enterprise use, as well as how to design for these uses. Designing for Augmented Reality was a unique challenge for the design team, as the technology is in a young and fast evolving stage, and the designers had to create their own design rules and guidelines.
IBM Open Liberty
IBM Open Liberty is a newly open-sourced version of an IBM software product that needed to be rebranded and refreshed for a new audience of Java developers. With this visual redesign of the Open Liberty website, the user experience was streamlined to help users get started with the product faster and easier. The fun new visual aesthetic, featuring an outer space theme, also offered a totally new voice and tone for the product, enticing a modern user base and helping to foster a vibrant user community.
IBM Event Streams
IBM Event Streams is a offering that helps developers and IT Operators react to events in real time and provide more engaging customer experiences. The software is based on Apache Kafka™, a widely used, technically complex open source technology, and offers a redesigned user experience that is tailored for the target users. IBM Event Streams sits in the middle of an organization’s infrastructure, integrating separate applications and enabling users to access all their information in real-time. The design team’s overall goals were to create a product that is accessible to both novice and expert Kafka users, as well as to provide support and a community for their customers.
IBM Agile Service Manager
IBM Agile Service Manager allows IT Operators to view and access information on their application, service and infrastructure issues and relationships in real time. The design team focused its efforts on a real-time topology viewer that, interacts with the change agents in an application environment, and updates the topology based on any changes detected, helping IT Operators quickly resolve any issues. When creating the user experience for IBM Agile Service Manager, the design team worked alongside developers and product managers and conducted intensive user research in order to understand the needs of both the IT Operator and DevOp job roles. IBM Agile Service Manager was developed as a feature for IBM Netcool Operations Insight.
Creating a Design-Driven Business
It’s exciting to see more and more of the products in the IBM Cloud, Data and AI portfolio getting recognized for their user experience design. This is our third award announcement this year, after receiving awards for IBM Cognos Analytics and IBM API Connect. Making our products design-driven and user-centric is a constant priority of ours, and we rely on user research and feedback at all stages of our work in order to provide a quality product experience for our users. As we continue to drive towards excellence via design, these recognitions are proud moments not only for us, but also for the broader enterprise design community in the software industry.
Winning Teams
IBM Immersive Data:
- Design Director: David Townsend
- Design Team: Alfredo Ruiz, Reena Ganga, Jenna Goldberg, Brianna Benson, Jan Hassel
IBM Event Streams:
- Design Manager: Andrew Gatford
- Design Team: Victoria Paterson, Chatura Fernando, Sasha Williamson, Peter Loveland, Tom Waterton
IBM Open Liberty:
- Design Manager: Jay Cagle
- Design Team: Patrick Nyeste, Megan Mulholland
IBM Agile Service Manager:
- Design Director: Sandra Tipton
- Design Team: Britta Binning, Rhiannon Barrington, Angela Boodoo, Dan Brown, Joseph Cooper, Kieran Geoghegan, Chloe Poulter
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.
