Lendyr
IBM | Watson Assistant | UX Design Co-op
Lendyr is a fictitious financial service company used to demonstrate IBM Watson Assistant’s Web chat capabilities.
WHAT I DID
Product: Watson Assistant
Position: UX Design Co-op
Role: Lead UX Designer
Company: IBM
IBM Watson Assistant (WA) is a complex product with a large variety of features in support of our customers’ needs. New features are released frequently and helpful documentation and tutorials accompany almost all parts of the product. WA provides a lot of information, however, how can our existing and potential customers discover all of it?
PROBLEM
UNDERSTAND
Cognitive walkthrough
Firstly, I wanted to see without guidance just what and how many features we provide in Watson Assistant Web chat. So I dedicated time to exploring all of WA’s public documentation and resources.
DEFINE
I discovered a few things throughout the process:
There was no single list of features, features are spread across marketing pages, docs, and tutorials.
Docs are not specific to parts of the product rather they are specific to parts of the customer journey, so it can be difficult to find features.
Docs are technical and can be sometimes overcomplicated for a new user.
IBM Watson Assistant (WA) needs to provide old and new customers one accessible space to test WA Web chat features and discover all accompanying resources.
DEFINITION
EXPLORE
Competitive analysis
Existing patterns
To explore ways to achieve that, I looked at other examples of documentation and demo flows within and outside of IBM. For documentation and other support materials, I found different organization
IBM uses Carbon, a design system that provides the building blocks for all IBM products. My first instinct, as it was for all projects, was to see if there were any existing design components that
methods such as organizing by user type or by chronological order. For demo sites, I was especially compelled by free, self-guided demos with real applications.
could be recycled and pieced together for a demo site. Carbon has a UI navigation panel which I chose and transformed to act as my main functional component for the demo site.
CREATE
User flow/script
Wireframing
User testing
I mapped out a user flow for our first “Feature Tour”, a step-by-step guided demonstration of a feature or multiple features, by taking all of the key Web chat features and linking them with a
I brainstormed with mid-fidelity wireframes and slowly iterated into high-fidelity wireframes through constant design critiques. I prototyped my screens throughout the process to share with developers and the project manager.
I completed a series of 8 moderated, internal, user tests and surveys. I recorded all interviews and created an affinity map to organize my findings.
realistic application. A common Web chat application was using a banking website, thus our team created Lendyr, a fake bank company.
I created a demo site with two main features:
A fully interactive fictional website with Web chat or accompanying illustrations to allow users to test features for themselves.
A guidance panel that allows users to navigate through the demo site with or without instruction, discover all WA Web chat features, and access all related resources.