IBM webMethods Hybrid Integration

An iPaaS (Integration platform as a service).


While building an iPaaS, IBM acquires a competitor.

[PROBLEM STATEMENT]

[THE SOLUTION]

[MY ROLE]

My role

UX Designer


The Team

3 UX Designers
1 Visual Designer
1 Content Designer
2 Product Managers

Deliverables

Research Findings
User Personas
Med-Fi Wireframes
Go to Market Strategy

Tools

Invision
Sketch
Whiteboards
Keynote

Domain knowledge

Stakeholder map

To start, we spoke with EBA engineers and product managers to understand the product space. To add clarity to our conversations with the product team, we mapped out key players' relationships to one another in a stakeholder map.

Work allocation

Through desk research we were also able to validate a strong need for this product. Employees who rely on data spend a disproportionate amount of time on menial tasks.

Key terms

Natural Language Processing (NLP): The ability of a computer program to understand human language as it is spoken.

AI Assistants: An application or program that learns and adapts based on a user's actions and environmental variations.

User research

Interviewed

7

Software developers

2

Decision makers

2

Business practioners / end users

Key findings

  • Only 1/7th of the software developers we interviewed had experience with NLP.

  • Software developers heavily rely on documentation and examples.

  • Decision makers liaise with data reliant employees and developers to create solutions that streamline their business. They typically need to evaluate dozens of tools to find solutions that fit into their workflow.

EBA pain points

Software developers expressed their frustration with the EBA platform:

"We had to work pretty closely with the [original EBA] development team… just to understand how we were expected to program with the library provided."

"We had to code a pattern… for every possible dimension and metric… we obviously weren’t going to do that for hundreds of metrics and dimensions manually."

We also learned from decision makers that our marketing pages were lacking:

"Well, I don’t know what it [EBA] does..."

User personas & flows

It became clear that there were 3 users we needed to account for in our design.

Empathy maps have us write out in detail what our users say, think, do and feel.

User 1: The "End User"

User 2: The "Decision Maker"

User 3: The Software Developer