IBM Design Community Platform

The IBM Design Community Platform is the home of the design community on IBM’s award-winning intranet, w3.ibm.com. The experience activates 2500+ formally-trained global designers, along with 20K UX professionals, and 200K design thinkers across IBM.

Designers can easily find news updates, announcements, insight into relevant events and initiatives, as well as meet our senior design leaders and see where they’re making impact. The site also provides a mental model for designers and design advocates to understand how design maps across the company, and provides context for how design and designers are essential to the IBM business.

Learn more about the w3 Design Community Platform release on Medium.

User need

The Design Community Platform was born out of a few key pain points that designers experienced, especially at the early and mid-career levels:

• Designers lacked visibility and insight into the landscape of design at the company. They needed to understand its scale, its geographical layout, and how both design and designers are embedded across IBM’s business units and technologies.
• Designers were missing context for how their work related to our business strategy, and needed deeper understanding of the industry landscape.
• Designers had no centralized place for resources related to design practice, community, and design leadership. They were largely relying on word of mouth and “link farms” to catalog and find resources.

Initial user research uncovered sentiments like the one below from a mid-career designer:

IBM’s so big and people can feel disconnected from each other—there’s no really good place where I can look for information where it would be helpful." - Mid-career designer

This need fueled the formation of the project and the subsequent Design Community Platform, as a gateway for designers to get connected, a source of truth and context. Our site would serve as touchpoint #1, guiding designers to the top resources they need to get their jobs done.

Our goal

The overall goal was simple—create a digital platform where our global design community could stay aligned and connected. We accomplished this goal by tackling a few hills, which have been redacted into statements of intent below.

Our hill statements:

• A globally shared design ethos and vision
  We seek to align designers across all geographies and business units around the narrative of design at IBM, how design and designers map across the company, and design’s values, mission, and vision.

• Preparing designers for the future
  We aspire to boost designers’ business acumen and understanding of the industry to equip designers for the future of enterprise experiences.

• Elevated design quality by activating leaders
  We achieve this by activating our community’s senior leaders, who uphold standards of excellence in practice and performance.

The team

The project lasted 5 months from the planning stage to launch. Our team was comprised of a team lead, a content designer, a UX designer who focused on the UI, a part-time visual designer from the brand organization who focused on the visual aspects of the UI, and me, the front-end development lead. We also had several senior leaders critique and provide guidance for the project along the way, with Vice President and Distinguished Designer, Doug Powell as our executive sponsor.

We leaned heavily on brand leadership to maintain consistency and reflect our design ethos, IBM Design Language. We also frequently collaborated with our design leadership program owners to accurately represent our senior design leaders on our site and to provide critique and feedback.

Contribution

Background

We referred to our project with codename “Project Singularity.” This was created, in jest, for the hypothetical future moment in time when the collective intelligence of machines and technological growth surpasses that of humanity, creating a super-intelligence that drastically changes human civilization. The joke was that our launch was to be the moment when singularity hits for the design community. Of course, this is not rooted in reality, as our design community yields collective intelligence greater than any one website.
Singularity’s other meaning—in the gravitation sense—is when a black hole’s center, or “event horizon” becomes so strong, that nothing can escape, not even light. Our project was the gravitational singularity amassing all design link farms across the IBM business and sucking them into the void (never to return)! It would then spawn a new, more easily navigable universe.

As the lead front-end developer on the project, I was tasked with the responsibility of ensuring everything that design was cooking up could be turned into code in timely manner for our launch date. This meant configuring the services on IBM’s intranet hosting the site, creating the site hand-in-hand with designers, and ultimately, launching it. Because our team was so small and scrappy, I was able to help with the early ideation and research before development started to happen. This afforded me the opportunity to interview users and understand our information architecture a bit more.

Tech stack

Because of the ubiquitous nature of Carbon’s Gatsby Theme in IBM’s ecosystem of website, it was a no-brainer to use this theme as the foundation for what would be our website. Carbon’s Gatsby Theme has many pre-built components ready to be used with just a few lines of MDX. It sped up our time-to-delivery exponentially. This also made it easy to have scoping issues with design. If the component that my designer colleagues wanted wasn’t in the Gatsby Theme, they knew that it would take extra effort and time for me to build out. The best part of using the Gatsby Theme is that using MDX made it really easy for me to teach my designers how to create their own PR’s for content changes. This allowed me to focus on heavier things like custom components and the all-white theming that we desperately wanted to do.

One of my favorite parts of building this site is that it gave me the opportunity to create a custom component that I was able to contribute back to the Gatsby Theme itself. We wanted the ability to create tiles with names and descriptions of Medium posts because the IBM design community has many active writers. We wanted to show case this talent front and center on the homepage, but I didn’t want to have to manually edit the MDX every time someone wrote a blog post. I decided to create a component that would fetch the latest Medium posts from a given organization or user. You can check it out here.

Impact

After the launch of w3.ibm.com/design, designers feel more in-touch with the community, and finally have one place where they can go to feel connected. They can cut through the noise, get the latest newsworthy content, and find resources that are useful for tackling their day-to-day jobs. Site analytics reported an average of 2K to 3K unique user visits per month, with 26K unique visitors in 2020.

Comparative experiences have received 8K unique visitors per year total as a benchmark, so it is outperforming its competition. We’ve received feedback from the community that it’s their first go-to destination for any design resources they need to get their job done, often traversing there to get the resources they need.

Three months after launch, we conducted research sending out a survey to a representative sample size of 70 designers and design managers across the business to understand what sites and content are most useful and engaging. The top response when we asked the open-ended question, “what internal websites do you visit to find design information like best practices, resources, case studies, and inspiration?” was our site. The top 3 most valuable portions of our site consist of design practices, career resources, and events.

Building this experience was a valuable and engaging convening point for the designers in our business. I learned quite a bit about our business, working in teams, and developed relationships and new skills.