Service
IBM Patterns Incubator
Service designer
June 2020 - August 2020
Abstract
6 weeks design incubator at IBM where a group of interns redesign a product or service IBM currently has. We redesigned a world-class IBM seller's course to maintain its quality while becoming remote.
Who
IBM Seller's use training programs as a way to increase their skillset and expertise with theirs sales. They use these programs to increase their reputation and land sales.
What
Use multi-day programs to become more distinguished as a seller
Why
This increases their reputation and skillset allowing them to get opportunity to get higher commission sales and costumers. Sellers want to still have this opportunity during a pandemic.
Impact
Maintaining a sellers course while in a remote environment can not only avoid the loss of potential opportunities for career growth but also expand to sellers internationally
My contributions
UX Design: worked with subject matter experts to understand the structure of the course and held multiple design work sessions and created UX flows of the courses itinerary and experience.
UX Research: Conducted 3 rounds of user interviews with IBM sellers as well as conducted a low fidelity user test along with a NPS survey
Project management: set up and organized agendas with coaches and managers for the team
Overview
This whole internship was held in a remote setting due to Covid-19.
SAIL is a world class course held at Harvard to take IBM sellers to the next level.
Our goal was to take an in person sales course and transfer it to a remote setting while maintain the world class quality it currently has. This was my first experience in designing a service and not a tangible product.
Questions and assumptions
We took a meeting and jotted down all our questions and assumptions. Met with our subject matter experts to understand the basis of the sellers course and did secondary research to understand SAIL training.
UX research
Interviewed 3 IBM sellers about their experience with the SAIL program
Synthesize and insight
We got multiple quotes from the sellers and saw that this course was a limited opportunity that is high demand we held sessions to pin point what are the qualities to make a course high quality
Flows and prototype
We set up a registration form and a 4 day schedule for the remote course which included tools and course content.
Test
Shared with 2 IBM sellers and asked to answer NPS style questions
Playback
Presented our problem and solution to the whole incubator including our manager, and our stakeholders.
Remote meetings
We held 5 hour long sessions a day
UX research
We reviewed our UX research protocols with our Stakeholders and started the interviews the next day
Designing the course
Using InVision we mapped out the steps a seller may go through to register and attend the course
Putting the user in
We personified our user and mapped out the experience from enroll to post 2 week check in
Retrospectives
Held weekly retrospectives within our team to understand what to celebrate and keep in mind
Powerful findings
Results of our user testing and our NPS scores
Outcomes and lessons
By the end of five weeks I was very impressed with what my team and I delivered. I think we overall had a great prototype and story showing our stakeholders that we understand highly experienced sellers well. While it wasn’t in anyones control but by the end of this program I wished I got to celebrate with my teammates in person. I spent five weeks bonding with my teammates but never actually meeting them in person.
My team and I would always find ourselves get stumbled and stumped with our hills statements. We would reiterate our hill statements again and again. At one point our hill statements were great but didn’t match our prototype anymore because we reiterated our prototype since our first hill statements. We had to change from redesigning the one single day to prototyping our tools and features.
If there was more time with the program I would have love to do a higher fidelity user testing by creating a slack workspace and creating a fleshed out enrollment form with interactions on Sketch. Take those higher fidelity prototypes and hold a user testing session for 30 mins. I think our feedback would be more detailed and more critical than our low fidelity.
Portfolio 2024
United States