sg

IBM has been a technical giant for over a century. It has lots of great traditions as well as bad ones. One of the projects I was involved in, was quite intensive yet inefficient at the beginning. I tried a few things to make the design process a bit smoother, and more clear to the whole project team.

Meetings, meetings, meetings

The project team was composed by members from 3 offices in China and 2 offices in US, plus a couple of remote working members. It was already quite a complex combination.

By the time I joined the team, it had already run a while and lots of things were already in-progress. However, things were not very well documented. It was quite difficult for people joined in the middle to understand what has been done and what need to do.

In order to get everybody onboard, the project managers organized tons of regular meetings everyday to discuss almost every single detail of the project. The first meeting starts at 9:30am in the morning, and the last one ends at 10:30 pm for almost everyday.

Unreadable documentations

Too much things were discussed during everyday meetings, all the discussed topics were recoded on a wiki page with all necessary screenshots, annotations, markups, etc.. It seemed to be a good idea to keep everything in one places, however, after months, 80% of the document were out-dated and there's no way for a new member to filter out which information was still valid.

Time for some change

The process was driving me crazy, so I decided to improve the user experience of the project itself first. I put together everything we already had and put them into different categories; labelled them with states like "design-ready", "in-progress" and "to-be-reviewed". So the whole team in different locations could have a central place to check the overall design status.

Let the images talk themselves

We understand that reading long paragraphs isn't a pleasure experience, so we used images as much as possible to explain all the necessary details.

When images were not enough to describe all the details, we also made lots of videos and clickable prototypes to help explaining things.

Creating the design system

The team members changed a few times, so the design language was not consistent at the beginning. We spent lots of time to consolidate everything together and created our own design system.
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It didn't just stop at the design side, we also sat down with the tech team to translate the images into reusable components. Once the components were in place, we could then 100% focus on the user experience, rather than always struggling with some visual tweaking.