IBM Business Assistant

IBM Business Assistant

Mobile, Desktop

Mobile, Desktop

UX Design • UI Design

UX Design • UI Design

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Overview

IBM Business Assistant helps you stay on top of your business-critical workload and proactively notifies you of changes to recommends steps for successful task completion.
I have worked as a UX Designer during my internship & working student contract at IBM Studio, Germany as part of the Cloud Services team on building this project.

Product site

MY ROLE

User research
Prototyping
Visual design

TEAM

4x UX, 2x Visual Design, 2 Design Leads, 1 Front-end Designer, 1 Researcher
Wider team: 15-30 engineers, 8 product managers, 4 squads

TIMELINE

1 year, 2016-2017

PLATFORM

Mobile, Desktop

TOOLS

Sketch, Jira

SKILLS I APPLIED

• Competitive analysis

• Prototyping

• Design thinking

• Visual design

• User interviews

MENTIONS IN THE PRESS

“Salient Process partnering with IBM on the new IBM Digital Business Assistant product”

“IBM in the cloud: Inside the tech giant’s quest to stand out against Amazon, Microsoft and Google”

“The 3 Major Players in Intelligent Business Process Management Suites”

“Will IBM’s New Digital Assistant Make You Smart?”

SUCCESS METRICS

from Ca 41,000

to Ca 260,000

Registrations

4,8/5

Apple App Store &
Google Play Store

DESIGN SYSTEM IMPACT

80%

Decrease in onboarding time for designers

80%

Decrease in Development time

By April 2020, the fleet had 100 vehicles, which extended Hamburg's urban mobility with the help of MOIA's algorithm-based electric ridesharing concept.

From January 2019 to April 2020 the user registrations, and app store metrics were succesfully improved by approx. 85%.

SUCCESS METRICS

• Improved user registrations
• Improve app store ratings - for Apple App & Google Play Store

4,6/5

Apple App Store &
Google Play Store

Registrations

from 0 to
Ca 400

Cambridge Judge Business School - Accelerate Cambridge - UK, Panacea Accelerator - UK, Newchip Accelerator - U.S.

3 Accelerators

4,6/5

B2B agreements for the SDK solution from Health Insurance & Fitness Tech companies

Due to the market pull from the B2B end from interested companies, DocMe changed the focus from B2C to the SDK solution within its first year.

Problems

The whole design team assisted our design researcher with extensive user research. I interviewed participants with different management roles within the internal IBM Studio. In total we did 120 survey participants to gain insights about their day-to-day work, productivity issues and workarounds.
Below are some of the main uncovered problems.

Fragmented tool landscape

One of the challenges was to understand the tool landscape in the enterprise or bigger size companies and how it is applied across different job roles for different needs.

Difficulty of defining a product management process

To better understand the product management workflow we interviewed internally across different management roles and departments. We found it challenging to define a specific worklow.

Needing to have real-time data availability to make scenarios and prognosis for decision making

Staying up to date with innovative products while having real-time data availability for easier decision making was another recurring identified pain point.

Opportunity

How might we better support 
business professionals to simplify
their workflow ?

Goals

The project aimed to cover the following aspects


Discover

This project began from the ground up, with no existing software, which is unusual within IBM. The scope was quite broad, so before the team scheduled a design thinking workshop, we did some preliminary research to have a deeper understanding of the problem area.
I also looked into our competition to better understand opportunities.

Ideation & Validation

Besides getting the green light from stakeholders we aimed to get the design in front of the target users to make sure we are heading in the right direction. I worked on prototyping different solutions and cca 10 users was used for each persona. This enabled us to validate changes from different angles and get a more complete picture.

Launch

My role in the larger team was to assist in the discovery phase and work on potential design solutions through wire-framing and iteration.
We’d have a daily scrum and a weekly meeting where we’d discuss the design and development.

Many of those sessions focused on cross-functional collaboration and team alignment, and we had to negotiate and postpone key features for MVP+1 on a number of occasions.

Tools integration

Another challenge was understanding the tool landscape in the enterprise and how it is applied across different job roles for different needs.

Built-in templates to get started

We concluded that including predefined workflows for different job roles and tasks as well as the option to customize them and create them from scratch is a good direction.
We looked into and integrated areas like Business Productivity, Sales, Collaboration, Marketing, Banking, Time Tracking, Customer Relationships and Team Management.

Custom solutions

The users can also create their own custom solutions. They have the option to integrate tools like Watson’s artificial intelligence which is a search and text-analytics platform that can retrieve information buried inside enterprise data.

Design process

Explored solutions &

team alignment

Our bigger team and stakeholders explored design solutions broadly. For team alignment we clarified the user goals we were designing for. These were that the assistant should understand a situation, prioritise, notify the user and help completing the task.

Design iterations

We explored how this would look within a customisable dashboard split into main activities cards.

This would give the user an overview on areas like: tasks that need priority, relevant information such as news, project status or involved people.

We also explored bringing more visibility to important emails, project notifications or missed client calls.

Final designs

Focus on built-in templates

We explored how this would look within a customisable dashboard split into main activities cards.

This would give the user an overview on areas like: tasks that need priority, relevant information such as news, project status or involved people.

We also explored bringing more visibility to important emails, project notifications or missed client calls.

Dashboard as a insights feed

After exploring how we can bring visibility within a dashboard for the activities involved in managing projects such as prioritising tasks, news project status or involved people - the direction changed.

Driven by the core feature capability of creating flows that integrate apps, services and Watson capabilities - the dashboard was built as a feed.

This allowed to bring visibility to the insights brought from the activated flows or “Skills”.

This solution prioritised the technical feasibility since it was easier to fetch the insights from the implemented active flows and also had the user impact of supporting the user to finish tasks.

Further product iteration

The problem spectrum was more broad initially. Even though the product discovery defined the main problems to deliver solutions and implement the IBM Business Assistant, I also had the chance to explore further opportunities during my master thesis as a working student.

Conversation integration

The goal of the master thesis was to further uncover pain points within the digital workers’ workflows and leverage further IBM Watson AI capabilities to potentially solve them.

So this is a direction that I went on to explore further.

Initial prototyping

The conversational interface, integrated within collaborative chat or voice was an initial idea explored early on that I worked on and prototyped for initially in the discovery and ideation stage during my internship.

However it ended up outside of the scope of the project for the release at the time.

Initially it was integrated within the app and the conversation was between the user and assistant directly.

The digital workflow-outside of involved connected tools, happens in conversations

One of the research findings that I considered is that a big part of the workflow for digital workers and tasks, and decision are spread through conversation apps such as Slack.

So I realised that there is a missed opportunity for the IBM Watson AI assistant to support the conversation and needed tasks within apps like Slack directly.

Since the common denominator was actually the input typing area, using the language processing Watson capabilities to support being on top of tasks directly within conversations made a lot of sense to explore.

Search for trends contextually

With the language processing AI the user can be supported to search for articles more easily within the conversations with the team, without switching apps.

Find relevant files within your conversation

Based on the uncovered pain point of wasting time to uncover information I considered the opportunity to find relevant files within the conversation.
For this the solution to integrate tools like Watson’s artificial intelligence to use search and text-analytics in order to retrieve information buried inside enterprise data made it a technically feasible option.

Automate tasks or set up alerts

Similar to how specific task flows were automated through the IBM Business Assistant platform, users would be able to access and adjust the flows directly within the conversation.

Slack integration

The integration in tools like Slack or messenger apps made sense since cross collaboration happens within conversation platforms.
Here, the design solution for sharing headlines, tracking a topic or saving it to a project is explored.

This design solution that uses AI Watson in cross collaboration within a conversation, can make these actions contextual as the conversation unfolds.

Product evolution

IBM Watson Orchestrate

Further on from IBM Business Assistant, IBM Watson Orchestrate was further developed.

It integrated conversational interface and made use of Watson AI’s capabilities in detecting sentiment in language among other features.

It was interesting to see how this feature was initially discarded and shaped the product strategy later on,
Happy to see that our work wasn’t wasted :)

PREVIEW

 “5 Things to Know About IBM’s Watson Orchestrate”

Problems

We gathered research data to validate the need for recording vital signs. We tried to understand how doctors and people might use vital signs health data. Below are the main problems uncovered.

Apple App Store &
Google Play Store

Seeing patients face-to-face presents an additional risk

To make informed decisions for patients the historical data of their vital signs is essential.


Patient historical data is essential but can be difficult to obtain

Most users of existing health apps believe that it is hard to get an optimal health analysis when it comes to understanding vital signs values.

Hard time to understand health or wellbeing overview in most apps

Goals

Build the mobile and desktop versions for personal use and doctors use. The approach is to ship a baseline functionality to build, test and ship within 6 months to learn from and improve on.

Launch

Health Tech is a highly regulated area. For the launch in the UK on the Doctors platform it was important to integrate regulatory guidelines. We worked and tested using the NHS sandpit environment and provided NHS login. For the Personal use, we obtained the UKCA mark and offered user transparency regarding data and tech aspects.

Build trust

To reach product-market fit in a within the UK within 12 months for both personal use and patients before growing to other regions.

On the Personal app side, we targeted Cambridge Colleges and for the Doctors side, we approached other HealthTech startups.

Grow

The DocMe Personal mobile version & DocMe Doctors SaaS version must achieve these main goals to be considered successful.

Opportunity

How might we better support an inexpensive solution for health-conscious young adults  to take care of their health & wellbeing and to communicate their health information with their doctor remotely?

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