IBM Social Media Analytics
Improving a legacy product's experience while advocating for a culture of user-centric product strategy
Challenges
The goal at hand was to build a strong partnership with a team of developers and product managers who had never worked with designers before.
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The product itself was a robust & complex analytics offering but had a dwindling customer-base because of the outdated user experience and lack of data visualizations suitable for social media data.
My role
Design lead, UX Designer, Facilitator and Researcher
Team
2 Visual Designers, 3 Offering Managers, 3 Development Managers and team of 15 developers.
Product
IBM Social Media Analytics​ - a tool companies use to analyze social media data and use insights to improve their business outcomes.
Redesigned experience for IBM Social Media Analysis
Leading a team to improve cross-disciplinary collaboration
In addition to conducting Design Thinking training sessions with developers, I facilitated team workshops to set roadmap priorities and co-design a new experience for the product using research insights.
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In order to reduce the silos between design, development and offering management, we worked closely together to cultivate a culture of early feedback within the cross-disciplinary team and focused on continuous delivery to implement design iterations.
Roadmap prioritization workshop
Tackling the product challenge
I co-conducted user interviews to support and update our personas and understand the user's main issues with the existing product.
Based on research insights, we redesigned the information architecture to scale better and support an intuitive flow of content and user actions.
Key user flow 1: Set up
Users set up a query to gather social media data on specific topics
The 'before' experience for setting up query
New set up experience
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Improved overall information architecture
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Updated visual language
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Integrated suggestions for topics based on text analytics
The new experience for setting up query
Key user flow 2: Analyze
Once they have the right data from social media sources, users analyze it using various visualizations
The 'before' experience for data analysis
New analysis experience
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Improved navigation
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New types of data visualization
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User-friendly terminology
The new analysis experience
Later in the project, I led the design of new data visualizations that would enable users to get better insights. The new data visualization examples included automated theme identification, conversation clusters and social sentiment analysis.
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As our design team continued to iterate on the new product, I conducted qualitative user feedback sessions to ensure a valuable experience for our end-users.
Working within constraints of continuous delivery while being a part of a larger product gave me and the team an opportunity to learn and embrace agile practices.
Outcomes and takeaways
By continuing to advocate for Design Thinking methodologies, I ensured that strategic decisions about the product roadmap were made with a user-centric approach.
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I learned to better manage stakeholder expectations during this project and being in a Design Lead role allowed me to learn about my own leadership style and grow.
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Last version of the product before it was discontinued: https://youtu.be/P3wEiJBOvNU