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Welcome to CoLab!

A platform focused on providing visibility between product teams at IBM Design and providing a space for designers to create a visual timeline of their work.

Over a five week period we (a team of five designers in the IBM Design Maelstrom Program) developed a Beta for CoLab that can be seen below.

Now, let's back up, and show you how we got here.

We interviewed over 18 designers within IBM Design to gain insight into how these designers were currently recording their process and collaborating with others across all disciplines (Visual, UX, Research, and Front End).

Framing Question: How can we build proficiency of the IBM Design Language within the IBM Design community through a feedback loop that facilitates trust and transparency?

What we learned.

So we started making, focusing on a couple of key ideas.

SORTING

First, how would IBM Designers want this information? We wanted them to be able to come to the site and immediately find what they were looking for without being bogged down by things that weren't pertinent to them. Also, we wanted them to be able to find other work and inspiration from other projects that might be similar to theirs.

CREATING A VISUAL TIMELINE

We wanted designers to be able to see their design process in CoLab, visually. By doing this, 6 months or a year down the road, designers can go back to their old designs and see why they made certain decisions. CoLab is a place to store your "why".

Also, we want to help designers who feel like they are leaving behind good ideas because they aren't pertinent in the present solution. By keeping track of these ideas, we leave opportunity to use them at a later date for a different product.

COMMENTING

We also wanted designers to be able to get feedback from sources other than their internal team. On top of this, we wanted to build a story behind their design decisions, by showing their iterations, the feedback pertinent to each iteration, and "aha" moments in their design.

What Next. After the Beta.

Once we had our Beta we used it to test, and see what was important to include within the next version.

We reached out to our sponsor user's again with physical invitations (seen to the right), letting them know we wanted to know everything we could about their experience with our Beta. We wanted them to break it!

From user testing with out sponsors we figured out what was working and what we could improve in the next version of our platform.

Future Opportunities

Having a visual timeline of their work was something user's were currently missing and saw great value in. In the next version, we also see an opportunity to incorporate a "graffiti" approach to leaving feedback. In this way, not only will users be able to get valuable feedback on specific design components, but they will also be able to track it over time. And, since all IBM employees already have their schedule recorded in Verse, there is an opportunity to integrate Verse and request feedback from other designers when they are available.

With talking about feedback came interesting insights about company culture and politics. From our user research we realized that providing total anonymity was not the answer since the reviewer lost a certain amount of accountability when they were anonymous. Instead the reviewer would be anonymous to the community but not to the person that they were giving feedback too. In this way, a line of communication would still be open in case further discussion was necessary.

ROADMAP

For the beta we had to reduce our scope. We focused primarily on adding visibility between product teams while also quieting the noise of distractions happening within the site. However, our plan going forward is as follows.