The Problem

When a team of developers at IBM created the original RedRock prototype at a hack-a-thon, it showed promise in technology capabilities, but wasn't focused on the needs of a specific user and didn't have a compelling or usable interface. It currently resembled a spreadsheet. We knew we could take it further.

Evaluate Existing Technology

RedRock was initially designed as an iPad app, but the paradigm of the spreadsheet didn't really seem to fit the presentation. When every cell is editable, it's hard to use touch to navigate, something that's necessary on an iPad. There were a few other strange interactions, some obvious visual updates to be made, and one overall question: if the user is interested in the content of tweets, why are they looking at them in a spreadsheet that hides the majority of the text?

Clearly, the technology was here, but the experience was not.

Secondary User Research

Because of our short timeframe, we weren't able to conduct the level of extensive generative user research that would normally help a project like this. However, working at IBM proved to be beneficial here. We found many other teams within our studio who had interviewed and researched our target user: a marketing analyst. We leveraged their work and learned as much as we could about this user. We also gathered data from external sources such as job descriptions and articles.

Synthesis

Marketing analysts are results-oriented users who enable others they work with. They live in a fast-paced environment where they sometimes struggle with lack of access to the correct data: "access denied, contact your system administrator." They receive requests from coworkers in the business, gather and shape data, and deliver reports. While data quality isn't their primary concern, they often spend time cleaning and shaping data to fit their needs.

Image is from secondary research and therefore not created by the team.

Persona Creation

Given our new knowledge of our user, we drafted a research-based persona.

Monica is a mid-level Marketing Analyst who focuses on social media analytics as a large part of her work enabling business insight and decisions within her department. With a BA in Marketing, she is not as technical as some of her colleagues, but is a fast learner with a solid base knowledge of standard analytics tools such as CRM systems, Excel, and social media platforms.

Sketches

Since sketching is the quickest way to get a variety of ideas out on paper, we started there. we started with a few expansive, blue-sky ideas, but quickly realized that some of the facets of the experience wouldn't be accomplished in the given timeframe. We scoped back our thinking and created a second round of sketches.

Since we were working on a short timeline, much of this work was done in parallel. In this case, Raphael and Kellyn iterated on most of the sketches, with feedback from the team, while I drafted our persona.

Sketch by Raphael Bouchard.

Wireframes

When we were satisfied with the direction, we moved on to mid-fidelity digital wireframes. Given the rapid iteration, we shared this responsibility, creating wireframed user flows with short turnaround times, and presenting them to our development team in remote collaboration sessions.

Visual UI Design

As we moved forward through the wireframing process, we began to work in parallel on visual design elements. We took cues from some of the social media apps whose data we were leveraging. We leveraged the IBM Design Language so that the app would feel like it belonged to a family of other analytics products. It was an exercise on working within an established visual system.

The screens to the right are part of the first round of visual iteration. You can see the final design work implemented in code in the videos below.

Spark Summit

The first event we presented at was the Spark Summit at the Spark Technology Center and Galvanize in San Francisco. Fresh from the launch of the Alpha version, we were met with positive feedback and general excitement.

This video shows Kellyn Carpenter presenting our design process for RedRock to a room of developers and data scientists at the Spark 2015 Summit.

See the blog post by Katharine Kearnan about RedRock here.

IBM Insight Conference

Our next stop was the IBM Insight Conference in Las Vegas. There, we showed off the demo to attendees in an interactive demo room (I was responsible for presenting it for an entire day), and it was also presented by executive leadership on a main stage.

Overall, we received positive feedback from the event. Since it was a twitter-based app, we took to Twitter to gauge what attendees were saying. Overwhelmingly, people were excited. IBM Sales representatives were curious to know how they could get more information about RedRock in order to sell it to their customers.

This video shows a demo of RedRock Alpha by Steve Beier, Program Director. Steve demoed this live to the same room of developers and data scientists at the Spark 2015 Summit.

INFORMATION ANALYZER

Web App | Team Project

With data analysts in mind, we transformed the experience of a legacy offering, reinvigorating a product that is integral to many of the world's corporations.