IBM Design Track Accelerate Program
@IBM
Tools
Figma, Notion, G-Suite, Zoom, WebEx, Slack
My Role
Design Track student, solo designer and UX researcher
Time Line
3 months, May-July 2023
This case study is still a work in progress as of Jan 2024!
Introduction
During my time at IBM, I was an Accelerate student under the Design Track. In 8 short weeks, I was tasked with learning design theory, connecting with IBMers, attending weekly learning and application design and career foundational skills. At the end of the summer, we were to choose a practice or object that we see differently as a designer before and after IBM Accelerate to demonstrate growth. I decided to discuss my learning experience and the system that I would have designed in order to allow myself and future Accelerate students use their time wisely and utilize the plethora of resources that IBM offers.
My Role
For three weeks I worked on this project on my own to analyze the learning experience at IBM for the final project. I created the physical journal prototype, conducted 10 user interviews, analyzed findings and presented my progress on my own.
Problem
Students want to be able to make the most of their time at Accelerate and utilize each resource efficiently.
Action
To recreate an Accelerate journal that could have been a part of the IBM Accelerate welcome package as a redesign.
Goals
-provide routine but also non-overwhelming assignments for students to do after each session
-encourage meaningful coffee chats by writing intentional questions and providing thought-provoking prompts
User Research & Findings
Interview questions were curated and written up based on study habits to create features that were most helpful for the journal (especially if they fell behind), mental fatigue and how students combatted it in order to stick to my goal of preventing the intimidation of the resources and mentors at IBM that most students reported feeling and their thoughts on the Accelerate program specifically so that I could tailor and filter designs that were more or less important based on what students thought was most beneficial for their learning.
I ensured that most questions were tailored towards them asking me a question or describing a story. Through the UX interview session with IBM, I was able to learn from designer Roosevelt T. Faulkner that people are better at telling stories, not answering questions on the spot. Empathizing with my user interviewees helped me understand not only what they were feeling, but how intense it was and why including smaller details like thoughts and feelings that would be harder to record with just simple question asking.
Findings
After interviewing 10 students, 8 from the Accelerate program and 2 college-level students from Cornell, I found that there were some similar findings in terms of Accelerate reflections (sans the 2 outliers participants) but very varying study methods. This posed a challenge for me, because I was to design something that was able to suit everybody’s needs, but it was also difficult to do so to accommodate everybody’s values and tastes in their study style.
Questions List:
General Study Questions
How do you take notes for rigorous classes? How does that change based on the difficulty of the course?
Could you tell me a time where you had a hard time catching up in a class. How did you improve that situation? Any specific tools that you use?
Do you journal? if so, how frequent and what do you write about?
What’s your go to method of planning during the school year or in general? Do you use online tools or more traditional notebook means?
Accelerate Program Reflection
What did you find most helpful in Accelerate? Why?
What did you find least helpful in Accelerate? Why?
If you could change one thing about the program-anything at all-what would it be? What was the benefit of joining IBM for this summer? Why IBM in particular for this summer?
Anything that resonated or any moment that has stuck with you at Accelerate?
“I handwrite all of my notes, but I color code everything, so I can read and internalize the information quicker and more thoroughly.”
“I wish we could’ve gotten more tangible feedback and practice…so we can get more meaningful debrief and feedback from mentors,”
“Sometimes information is too text heavy so I have to screenshots and make annotations on the slides directly. I refer back to slides when studying,”
These quotes were pulled out as the most repetitive findings during my research. The cards in yellow were findings I paid attention to the most. I was able to categorize these yellow cards into habits and learning preferences. These were very important as it would tell me how to design the journal based on what people have tried to do in the past (and whether their attempts were successful or not) and how to work around it. This would be my prototype structure. Learning preferences were important because it would tell me what should be in these sections and structure would set the prototype content.
Prototyping Process
Each design session featured a new IBMer who was an expert in their field. There was a lively discussion session where students logged “quotes” from these speakers that highlighted comments the presenter made that were inspirational or memorable. I added these to the top of the page, the best quote from the session. I also took inspiration from the Cornell note taking style, where there were messy notes and then rewriting them. Considering one of the pulled quotes that said there wasn’t much time to rewrite them, I made boxes small to encourage students not to write as much and save notes for important quotes only.
Coffee chats were highly encouraged during my time with IBM, and so I made sure to give them its own section with questions and notes area provided for the coffee chat we were to have a week.
As part of our design education, we were also given homework assignments in the form of journaling prompts, and the collection of summaries help ideate the final project. Thought that was the intention, I found my peers and I being less inclined to follow through with this schedule, so I tried to lower that barrier by only urging students to fill out a page every day to be intentional with the session but not having to feel too overwhelmed by the homework and looming final project.
Bump in the Road
It was here that I realized I was designing much of this journal based on my commitment and my standards of effort that I was putting into Accelerate. A major finding that I missed out on was that there were varying levels of effort that my fellow peers were putting into the program and I should be designing for the collective, not just myself. I had thought I could make every aspect of Accelerate a feature in the journal but couldn’t continue designing this product and also convince myself that I was thinking of the users, not myself.
Prototype Revisions
In order to combat this issue, I found myself completely omitting several sections of the journal for my presentation. One was to reframe my design perspective to be more flexible to different kinds of students as if they were prospective users of my journal, and I decided to do so because I didn’t want the journal to be completely hand-holding the student, especially if the internship focused on navigating the design journey for the student themselves.
I also decided to change the note taking style. Cornell notes may work for me, but the constrained box might frustrate students despite my intention was to help make notetaking more concise. I also decided to redesign the Skillsbuild section. I wanted to simplify more of it, or possibly omit it if there were future iterations because it was definitely a place where I was designing the IBM Accelerate experience through my own perspective and eyes only instead of the community’s who thought that the Skillsbuild program was less helpful. But for now, I redesigned it to be simpler (with the free notetaking style in mind) and room for questions about that week’s Skillsbuild assignments, a summary of the lesson and action items that Skillsbuild would provide (like reformatting your resume with the new tips provided or work on revamping LinkedIn, etc.) I think these two changes would help the effectiveness of the program by giving room in the journal in future iterations to special features that only IBM would be able to provide to students during their time there: experience and storytelling.
Improvements for Next Time
If I had more time, I would have loved to user test my journal with regular students and Accelerate participants. I didn’t have time to create a fully fledged journal as well as user test in person as we were a remote workplace so I would have loved to be able to test my design so I could revise it based on feedback that wasn’t just my own improvements and standards. I also think more or a better written interview script would have helped because some of the features I incorporated in my journal were features that I myself would want to see, and might not have been designed with the holistic perspective of all Accelerate participants’ interests. Some students have different levels of interest and effort they want to put into IBM Accelerate, and for next time I would consider those findings next time.
I also found that not many of my interviewees enjoyed journaling or it was “something they knew they should do but couldn’t get their mind to do it,” so I would also branch out to other mediums of this kind of accountability-measuring and intentional learning recording formats.
Personal Reflection
I learned much more about myself and how I wanted to present myself to the world thanks to the mentorship of multiple IBMers in and out of sessions. I also was able to improve my portfolio, LinkedIn and work relationships with other students to learn from them and eventually conduct user interviews with them. I learned about other ways design can change the world, like in service, in advertising and physical products instead of just apps and websites.
Professional Takeaways
IBM was my first internship with a large team and it made me learn how to be more comfortable talking to professionals and coffee chatting often to learn about different design journeys and company culture. They helped me kick start my portfolio and expand my perspective on how design’s impact can be niche but impactful. I also learned different design methods like A/B testing, card sorting and branding oneself in and out of design.