What we learned as UX design interns at IBM
Co-written by Jose Banuelos and Andrew Cuevas
We first encountered IBM’s Enterprise Design Thinking while working on our BFA in Communication Design at Texas State University. The AIGA Texas State Student Chapter hosted a design thinking workshop with IBM Design. Soon after, our interactive media professor started implementing methods from the IBM Design Thinking Field Guide into the research phase of our projects. We also had the opportunity to hear from three designers working on the IBM Watson Health team to speak about what they do and give us feedback based on how they approach design. From all of these encounters, we’ve learned one critical lesson: the importance of human-centered design.
Our practice and exploration of human-centered design didn’t stop as we were both given the opportunity to join IBM as User Experience Design Interns in February 2019. Fortunately, we were both hired to work together on the same projects. During our internship, we successfully worked with IBM’s Master Data Management (MDM) product team on the UX design of software features, a Service Design Project for our organization, and a client-facing strategy video. As we look back on our internship experiences, we feel like it has quite a few ties back to producing a video.
Imagine transitioning from shooting video on your phone to a brand new DSLR. At first, you’re used to just pointing and shooting, but now you are faced with an array of buttons and switches you’ve never seen before. That’s how we felt beginning our internship at IBM. We had to learn the new terms, acronyms, and jargon that we had never heard before. In order to build domain knowledge about IBM MDM, we read articles, watched videos, met with designers, developers, and managers, and asked numerous questions. We took the initiative to get access to a full MDM product build so that we could have some hands-on experience. Learning information as complex as this takes time. It’s fine to not know everything in the beginning. There’s a lot to learn, but understanding as much domain knowledge as we could was one of the goals we set for this internship.
In creating a video, you need to have a vision of what you want your outcome to be. Think about how using a tool such as camera lens gives a videographer the opportunity to see different scopes by zooming in and zooming out. In both UX and video, you use tools to guide you in planning the sequences and how everything would make sense as a whole. Generally, this may include script writing, storyboarding, or gathering inspirations onto a mood-board. We used tools like Mural and a bunch of sticky notes to generate ideas and plot out stories. Having a story is a good way for others to understand your vision. In UX, storyboarding helps you understand what the user is going through and empathize with them and their journey. Envisioning scenarios allowed for better understanding on how solutions will have a great impact in improving the current situation. We let our user stories drive the decisions we make in designing the best suitable user experience.
Likewise, throughout our internship, we learned how important it is to plan out our goals from creating a full experience-based roadmap to doing a team stand-up. For instance, every Monday we wrote down the tasks that we need to complete for that week and the things that block us from achieving those tasks. At the end of the week we then wrote what we actually achieved, our plans for the next weeks, and any other blockers. For our design thinking project, we determined solutions that could happen near-term, mid-term, and long-term. These were great tools for us to keep in track of what we were doing and finish projects in a timely manner.
To produce a great outcome, a lot of things happen behind the scenes that people don’t realize. In video, you can spend hours shooting before getting that perfect angle. Let’s not forget the days editing and rendering before you actually achieve those perfect transitions and effects. This speaks to prototyping and user testing in UX Design. The prototyping process is long and goes through stages of iterations and testing, from conceptual sketches to high fidelity prototypes. Taking part in a live user test is important to see how users actually interact with the product and heard how they felt about it. More importantly, it involves a huge amount of team effort and collaboration to come up with innovative solutions that work and solve problems, even if your team members are thousands of miles away.
Creating video and designing a user experience both share similarities; however, the main difference is once the video is published, it’s final, it’s done! There’s no point of going back. Whereas in UX, a product out in the market is never considered final and feedback is always welcome. During our last semester in school we learned from an art director that in the world of advertising, a video campaign is considered done once it airs. Similarly, movies or shows don’t go back and change their story based on how the audience reacts. In comparison digital products are constantly asking for feedback that is used to improve the product, this is why we see different versions, and have constant updates that add or remove features. As the product grows, the designers who put the effort to work on it also do, making the job very fulfilling.
At the end of the day, even though video and UX design are very similar, they have one big difference. Video is based on what the creator likes, and as an art is very subjective. UX design is way of problem solving and works based on what people need not what it’s creator likes. Just like some videos with credits at the end, we would like to this opportunity to thank the people who have made our internship a great learning experience. We have grown in the span of four months.
Jose Banuelos and Andrew Cuevas are UX Designers at IBM based in Austin, TX. The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.
