Web / Mobile / UX & UI Re-design
CAS App
CAS App - a platform for research collaboration
between industry & academia
My Role
CAS App is IBM Advanced Studies’ project management tool for product innovation research projects. It creates an ease of engagement between IBM and our academic collaborators by facilitating on and off-boarding of team members to projects, tracking project deliverables, collecting ideas, and overall providing a means for researchers and IBMers to communicate and collaborate.
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Over the course of 12 months, I led the holistic re-design of the platform as UX/UI design lead on the project. Working closely with product managers, engineers, and other stakeholders, our team re-designed the platform from the ground-up to create a user-centred solution for collaboration, and provide a more personalized experience for our users.
Client
UX / UI Design
Heuristic Evaluation
User Interviews
Usability Testing
Prototyping & Wireframing
IBM Canada Ltd.
CASE STUDY
Observe
Get to know the users, understand the context in which they operate, uncover their needs, and listen for feedback.
Reflect
Get to know each other, align on intent, uncover new insights, and plan ahead.
Make
Explore possibilities, communicate ideas, prototype concepts, and drive outcomes.
Designing a user-centred platform
through IBM's Enterprise Design Thinking framework.
STEP 1 - OBSERVE
Getting to know the users & understanding the context.
User interviews
Empathy begins with getting to know people as people, not just as users. Asking open-ended questions about how they live, work, and interact with the platform, I interviewed 8 sponsor users, representative of our 3 key user groups (admins, faculty, and IBMers), in order to understand the hopes, fears, and goals that motivate them.
Usability tests
Our users form part of a complex, interdependent system of people and processes that work together to achieve a greater goal when interacting with our platform. Thus, I observed the same 8 users interact with our platform, the people, and tools in their environment in order to better understand their primary needs and pain-points.
Uncovering user needs, pain points & opportunities.
Emerging themes from our sponsor users.
Listening for feedback.
Quotes from our sponsor users.
STEP 2 - REFLECT
Defining a user persona.
Big ideas & feature prioritization.
Together with our sponsor users, we came up with ideas to address the needs of our users and capitalize on opportunities identified through our formative research.
STEP 3 - MAKE
Initial wireframes & rapid prototyping.
Low fidelity designs allowed us to test and iterate on our initial designs without having to spend too much time or resources on ironing out the details.
Visual.
Personalized.
Carbon.
Built for collaboration. Leveraging a clean, minimal design, CAS App 2.0 promotes collaboration through enhanced project discoverability. The redesigned home page enables users to explore and discover new and exciting projects by category or technology.
Optimized for productivity. A re-envisioned information architecture (IA) and improved navigation system offer a more intuitive, and personalized user experience. The integration of quick links provides immediate access to key features based on a user's role on the platform.
Designed with our
users in mind.
Optimized for every role — One of the biggest challenges I faced throughout this project was designing a platform to address the needs of 3 distinct user groups - IBM staff, faculty, and students. The solution? Curated links that act as a shortcut to our users’ most common tasks within the app & project recommendations that are tailored to our users’ interests and areas of expertise.
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Enhanced search & filter options.
Improving collaboration across project teams — CAS App 1.0 offered limited visibility into other research projects, making it difficult to browse or search for other project teams utilizing the same IBM technologies or working towards solving
similar problems. CAS App 2.0 promotes cross-project collaboration and discoverability through a dedicated filter widget that allows users to sort through projects based on IBM technologies, products, institutions, or research streams.
Built for discoverability & collaboration.
Manage and discover projects — The redesigned project page offers a visual introduction to every project with the introduction of project videos (as shown at the top of the screen).
Real-time admin reports.
Power to the users — A redesigned admin tools interface brings improved functionality and customizability to the users who use CAS App the most often.
Coming soon...
Dark theme.
