Case study: IBM Watson Health web experience

My Initial engagement at IBM Watson Health was to add some new features (aquisitions) to the existing Watson Health webpage within IBM.com. However, the team soon realized that the website was not doing justice to the breadth of work Watson Health was involved in and the AI-powered services it provided in the healthcare space. 

• The vision: To redesign the existing site within ibm.com to a wholistic web experience that features the five pillars of IBM Watson Health.
• Purpose: Present succinct value proposition that demonstrates IBM Watson’s deep understanding of pipeline value creation and R&D innovation.
• Target Audience: Marketing website for those interested in IBM Watson's work in the healthcare space. specially at the enterprise level.
• Challenges: A massive undertaking with many different business units. Create an identity for Watson Health while keeping true to IBM design language. Also, how to automate the creation/ redesign of over 200 pages and maintain consistency and structure across the board.

My Role

I was the Lead UX Designer responsible for creating and maintaining the IBM Watson Health website https://www.ibm.com/watson-health from 2016 - 2020. 

My work included concept design as well as mocking up the  wireframes and prototypes for the project.

I was involved in the end-to-end product lifecycle and worked with stakeholders, digital strategists, content writers, visual designers, and the development team to launch the website and post-launch iterations. 

I worked with the analytics team to analyze user data -- Pearl & Hotjar -- and recommend changes to improve user engagement and efficacy of the product.

I also lead a team of UXers during a major redesign of the website.

Guiding Questions

• Who our customer is?
• How do we steer them in the right direction?
• How do they search for a solution and how does the user find the service?
• How do they interact with the service?
• What services/ products/ pillars to feature?
• What were the main touch-points at each step where the user came in contact with the offerings and how to convert them into tangible transaction?
• What were the main pain points for the user during the customer journey?
• Who the competitors were and how we stack against them.

Empathise & define

• Worked with stake holders and strategists to create the unique identifiers and pillars of Watson Health to be featured.
• Worked closely with content writers and strategists to create initial content/ structure for our pages.

Ideate:

• Analyzed the research including competitor offerings and created user journeys and UX maps to better structure the website.
• Created sitemaps and navigation.
• Created early templates for the content writers to help structure the content and maintain consistancy. 

Prototype & Design

• Wireframed top level / parent pages. Leveraged templated designs for content driven pages.
• Helped create the Watson Health design library.
• Worked with IBM Design Language and Carbon design system to keep the web experience consistent. Worked with Brand Team on a regular basis to recommend new patterns.
• Worked with Visual designers to create high fidelity mockups.

Launch:

• Worked closely with developers to convert the wireframes into a tangible product.
• Helped developers in mitigating any roadblocks during the development phase.
• QA tested all the pages before pushing them live.

Analyse:

• Performed regular heuristic evaluations for the pages.
• Analyzed Hojtar data to recommend changes to boost user interactions on the webpages.
• Worked with SEOs to boost usability and searchability of the pages.

Iterate:

• The webpages were regularly revised and iterated upon to stay abreast with market trends and demands.
• The site went through a complete redesign and restructuring in 2019.
• The site was redesigned to move to Carbon Design System and Drupal.