•  User Research Methods   •

When it came to user research, IBM gave me unlimited access to customers and the room to explore different design thinking methods.

As a result, I learned first-hand what kind of approaches worked really well and (despite my best intentions) didn't. But I'm proud of my "failures," because that's where I learned the most and I try to share those takeaways.

•  Research Script  •

Over the years, I developed a research script that lets me and my team get the most from our customer engagements. This approach is essential when we're faced with rapid design iterations based on back-to-back user feedback sessions.

Here is an example of that script in action with confidential information blurred out.

•  User Adoption Spectrum  •

Considering IBM's customers span the globe with a variety of industries, job roles and goals, it was hard to understand who exactly I was designing for. Wanting to get out of this guessing game, I worked with a team of designers and user researchers to interview customers at Colgate, Raytheon, ADP, 3M, and Caterpillar.

After 27 1-hour interviews, a clear pattern started to emerge. There were specific behaviors and sentiments that mapped to 5 levels of personal adoption. This nuanced understanding of our customers gave us a framework for being more empathetic, purposeful and strategic when designing for personal adoption.

•  Cognitive Opportunity Rankings  •

Cognitive (AI) is technology looking for a purpose. It was my job to understand the potential for this emerging technology and propose different ways we could apply it to our portfolio of products. Making sure we didn't 'solve a problem nobody had,' I ran 2 separate research engagements to find out (1) work related problems and (2) corresponding opportunities. The ideas that ranked high in both went into our cognitive kick-off workshop.