Each item recaps a project experience (estimated 1 minute reading time per project).

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Context

Merative rapidly sought to modernize its flagship Health Insights (HI) suite that provides analytic insights on the claims data of Payers and Employers.

My role

I led the redesign to modernize HI, including task flows among the main experiences: dashboards, an Analyst tool, and a BI tool.

I workshopped with business leaders to understand the executive vision and requirements, from which I developed use cases and storyboarded a "concept car" demo.

A newly onboarded designer and I made a multi-flow clickable Adobe XD prototype for validation, marketing, and sales purposes. We collaborated with the cross-functional agile team to determine, release, and demo MVP software.

I co-led a "No AI without IA" strategy to tag visualizations by a business or clinical question, with metadata to enable machine learning, powerful search and filtering, and conversational flows to deliver insights. I designed and delivered a content catalog, bringing aspects of the strategy to fruition.

Results

We went from concept to MVP delivery in about 7 months with a coherent, integrated platform that has been well-received by salespeople and clients.

Context

As the pandemic began, suddenly every company became a healthcare company. IBM Watson Health sought to release a solution as soon as possible to help Employers' COVID task forces manage the risk to their personnel.

My role

In designing the Return to Workplace (Workplace Health Advisor) command center, Design colleagues and I facilitated Design Thinking workshops to rapidly identify scenarios and use cases. We co-invented a new approach with the Data Scientists working on analytic insights, leading IBM to draft a patent disclosure.

The cross-functional team and I iterated on the design every few days for 90 days in high fidelity, working on everything from user research to information architecture to interaction and visual design with radical concurrency. It was an unconventional but effective process. I greatly accelerated UI development by successfully advocating the use of the Carbon Design System.

Results

We went from concept to delivery in 6 weeks and immediately captured 4 clients and $5.5 M in revenue.

Context

The New Jersey Turnpike Authority sought to integrate and modernize its various technologies to better support its workflows. IBM Research had an asset we could harden into a scalable industry solution for Transportation.

My role

I spent more than 500 hours conducting on-site ethnographic research, workshops, and design playbacks, leading to a fulfilling client relationship. Because I understood the differences between the buyer versus user perspective and what trainees needed, in contrast to seasoned Roadway Operators, I knew where to innovate and where to be conservative with change.

One of the key challenges was designing for dense data (hundreds of dynamic signs and other equipment), which I solved with a roadway matrix view. Life-size paper prototyping helped Roadway Operators to envision how much content could be displayed on the command center's wall monitors.

Results

This project outcome satisfied a range of stakeholders, leading to a client reference and IBM case study. The CTO said, "Tricia's leadership, caring, and communication skills were instrumental in helping us to achieve both a technical and cultural transformation."

Context

With this labor of love, I sought to level up my design colleagues' data savvy. My director tasked me with combining Analytic Consultant and Designer best practices into easy, repeatable patterns.

We also wanted to shift the culture from a dashboard visual design focus to identifying flows of business and clinical questions that Artificial Intelligence (AI) or people could use to present actionable insights in new ways, such as conversations or catalog searches.

My role

I evangelized user research and Design Thinking workshops to trace from user needs to the questions they ask, to an effective information architecture, to the use of AI in designs. I inventoried 350 existing dashboards, finding 75 patterns for visualizations. I organized them by question on an internal site, adding guidance about personas, data and analytics, organizational maturity, and measuring design outcomes.

Results

Cross-functional teams on multiple products used my materials to accelerate workshopping and developer specs. I designed an IBM executive training curriculum and piloted it with two teams beyond Watson Health, leading a corporate IBM education team to include the topics in a course.

Context

A government client's CIO sought to enable Business Users with easy-to-use analytics so the Business Users could rely less on the few available Analysts. Also, Analysts could focus on their strategic work items instead of handling one-off requests from Business Users.

After engaging with IBM Research for months, the CIO was ready to see UX designs when our Development team became involved. I could access 40 pages of Research interviews but could not conduct additional interviews.

My role

I was tasked with designing a configurable analytics framework after understanding the shared and unique analytic tasks of personas and their departments in the ecosystem.

I carefully parsed the 40 pages of existing user research. I organized it into use cases by the nature of the analytic task. I distilled that into a 1-page model that I validated with the client. I then was able to design a flexible user experience that addressed the varying needs, including report scheduling and report templates capturing Analyst wisdom.

Results

The CIO praised me for "anticipating the needs" of a variety of Business Users, to whom I now was granted access. I engaged them in Design Thinking workshops to co-create designs for additional use cases.

Context

A client CIO eagerly awaited IBM's dashboard design. Internally, our team agreed that the existing Intelligent Operations Center (IOC) status dashboard was outdated and ugly. The IOC Engineering Director was fond of a traditional-looking dashboard shown to him by an outside creative agency, while the IOC Design Director's motto was to "break it and remake it," so he was reluctant to use a typical design.

My role

I drafted a dashboard design based on client needs, but neither director liked the dashboard. I invited a few designers from other teams to a 3-day "Blitz." (Our theme song was "Ballroom Blitz" by The Sweet). After reviewing the user research, each of us designed a dashboard, including an unusual "concept car" design.

I held a meeting with the designers, directors, and the client to review the dashboard options. I asked everyone to say what they liked and disliked about each design instead of advocating for a favorite. Based on the eye-opening results, we designers collaborated to draft a coherent dashboard experience with the best aspects of each option.

Results

The client CIO felt a sense of co-creation and therefore was more supportive of the end result. The Engineering Director demonstrated increased confidence in our designers.

Context

Our Design Team redesigned the Health Insights dashboards as the dashboards were reimplemented in a new Business Intelligence (BI) tool.

Because the Analysts who would be customizing the out-of-box dashboards for our clients were not BI programmers, our cross-functional product team kept the dashboard coding simple, at the expense of some slicker visual design. Our Product Director questioned whether the resulting dashboards had enough "Wow."

My role

I had 3-5 days to respond to the Product Director's question, working alone. I researched state-of-the-art dashboard design, including competitors, designs shared online and cited in "best of" articles, and real-life examples showing our BI tool's visual design possibilities.

I identified what I liked and disliked about each dashboard I curated. I synthesized the strongest characteristics into three coherent "makeovers" of one of our dashboards. I shared my findings with the cross-functional team..

Results

Given this information, the Product Director was satisfied and ultimately agreed with our approach. I was able to use one of the three makeover options to accelerate a Health Equity dashboard design project.

Context

The Technical Writing and Architecture communities were addressing a pervasive client pain point -- separately.

My role

I joined the Architecture Community, then initiated and led a "solution information" workgroup. I recruited 22 like-minded people representing 50+ IBM teams.

After studying the problem, we produced a white paper of our research findings, with suggested action owners. It included a cost-avoidance business case.

We also pitched an incubator project and received funding for an easy GUI toolkit enabling client-facing personnel and clients themselves to combine product-level technical information into customized solution information for the client's exact set of products and services without having technical writing or design skills. I learned a lot about being a Product Owner.

Results

The toolkit made a formerly time-prohibitive task feasible. It had 50+ downloads globally and was piloted with at least two clients. Several teams incorporated our white paper actions into their Fall/Spring plans.