Injecting fun into work
Besides the obvious events like holidays and celebrations, I look for occasions to make the work itself fun and hands-on. I like to make with my hands. These are moments where I can unleash my creativity further, as well as my team’s, and give them the opportunity to dust off their lesser used skills at work and shine. Designers love engaging in such pursuits. And the engagement ripples far beyond the Design team to our cross-functional peers and users.
String theory
think 2019 | user research | interactive string activity
INCEPTION | As a prolific User Researcher, I had always wanted to visually present all my research participants’ profiles using a parallel coordinates plot, which I commonly saw in my notebook research with Data Scientists. I never took the time to. So when we were planning for THINK 2019 in San Francisco, I seized the opportunity to make it happen.
PRODUCTION | It had to be interactive and hands-on. I researched such installations done globally. I enlisted the help of an Industrial Designer on my team. And I sought input from Researchers across the org to narrow down the columns and options to best cover the range of participants for their various UX sessions at the conference. Though it was well past the call for submissions, I negotiated to run it in the hallway outside the User Experience session rooms as participants flocked in. It was the perfect spot. We had 86 participants.
IMPACT | Participants loved the interactivity. So did IBMers. Folks took pics and tweeted about it. The two Designers whom I involved in building and running this activity with me were super engaged. One Researcher from London was inspired and ran one there afterward. Our VP of Design included it in his THINK 2019 blog post. We did some analysis on the participant data. And it became a physical artifact in our SF studio.
Taking AI to production with Watson Machine Learning
data and ai forum seoul 2019 | Storytelling | stop-motion video
INCEPTION | Following successful events at Data and AI Forum Miami, Marketing invited our Design org to the next Data and AI Forum in Seoul. Teams were asked to submit more fun and interactive sessions. When no one on my team did, I came up with a two-part proposal. The first part consisted of a prepared stop-motion video where viewers would learn how they could use Watson Machine Learning to deploy their analytic models to production. This would inspire session participants for the second part.
PRODUCTION | I rallied the team to create a scenario together. We put my kids’ toys to work. One of my team members had previously taught how to create stop-motion videos in a prior studio learning session, so I naturally called on her to lead the project. The Weather Company shared our studio floor and had a media room and equipment that they kindly let us borrow. Everyone on the team got to help in the making. I am extremely proud of my team for the amazing creativity they exercised.
IMPACT | The video was very well received. Not only at the conference. Our Product Manager immediately wanted to put it on the WML marketing page. Doing my due diligence, I ran it by Brand. They unfortunately said it wasn’t to brand as-is and couldn’t live on the external page. At that point, we were not able to redo the video due to other work priorities. Nonetheless, the video was circulated and appreciated internally. Importantly, we had fun making it. And many of us learned a new skill to reuse in the future.
Model deployment workflows
Data and AI Forum Seoul 2019 | customer workflows and scenarios | Felt storyboarding
INCEPTION | It had been challenging getting to understand customers’ model deployment workflows, for the simple reason that many were not at that stage yet. So for part two of the WML interactive session, my thought was to provide participants with Lego pieces and other trinkets and have them create their own stop-motion video that they could tweet about #wml. That was well before I knew what it really takes to make even a short stop-motion video! The goal was to show us their workflows, even if they weren’t deploying to production yet. My team helped build upon the idea. Eventually, we landed on using felt boards and pieces that participants could take pictures of. Easier to transport to and from Seoul. Way cheaper than Lego.
PRODUCTION | As I had nominated the Design Lead to travel to Seoul for this event, she and I did most of the production work. We cut large green felt cloth and hundreds of felt pieces in different shapes and colors to represent people, data, models, deployments, flows, blockers, etc. I cut them while watching my kids in swimming class. I cut anywhere. We put stick-on velcro on the back of individual pieces, so they could hold on to the green felt cloth.
IMPACT | While there were fewer participants than we had prepped for, the session was fun for those who participated. The IBM organizers in Seoul were very pleased. We got a handful of workflows or scenarios that we could learn from. And we still have all the material to reuse for future activities for any product or team.