Defining a healthy practice to create the conditions for success

Overview
Produce a mental model to guide us in our journey. Defining how and what we could build.

Challenge
In order to scale EDT and enable more people to practice, we needed to define what a ‘health practice of Design thinking’ meant on teams, and who was driving it to happen.

Solution
3 weeks of research, over 20 user interviews, secondary research into healthy team habits, and a ton of synthesis led us to a few major conclusions. 

1. Teams who produce human center outcomes have 3 key habits that map back to the EDT principles

2. There is someone (or more often a pair of people we called a ‘Magic Person’ and their ‘Partner in Crime’) on every team who drives those outcomes and the practice of EDT on a team

3. There has to be ‘healthy conditions for success’ set by upper leadership

Defining a growth ladder and designing milestones for measurement

Overview
In order to grow and up-skill people, there has to be a path forward that represents the human journey of meaningful progression, and a way to model the behavior of the leaders they look up to.

Challenge
How might we build a path for Design thinkers to move forward and develop their skills. And how might we demonstrate their value and measurement in a more formal way to executives and stakeholders?

Solution
Building on our research of healthy teams, I co-lead the development of a system of micro-credentials to foster accountability, help team members track their proficiency, and help leaders measure the success of their teams. I helped design the rubric in which we would evaluate users on their skills and executions. I owned the visual design of the badges, and iterated over time to maintain an aesthetic that would make people excited of their achievements and want to share them with the world.

Designing a delightful experience for people to learn design thinking

Overview
Build a scaleable and delightful learning experience for courses, lessons, DT tools and resources.

Challenge
Users needed basic functionality like progress tracking, recommended content, nudges and reward moments. The application needed to be responsive, and there was the unique challenge of needing the platform to be designed for the design transformation happening internally ay IBM, but also accessible externally to our clients and the public.

Solution
I worked to design, test, and collaborate with our developers to build an MVP learning platform while also creative directing the design and development of the Practitioner course. I was responsible for all screens, Information Architecture, UX flows, and visual design. Along the way I worked with stakeholders and users to validate the work as we went. Since the initial launch, I continuously improved and iterated the experience by leading new usability testing and implementing feedback. This included new learning components, a redesigned login flow, launching a new marketing experience, and a full visual redesign to the new IBM Design Language launched in 2018.

Crafting a structured format for building lessons and stories

Overview
We knew a huge part of success would be really great storytelling, and the methods and activities we would use to reinforce those stories.

Challenge
As a team, we needed a structured way to build lessons. We needed guiding principles, and a library of layouts to aid in a scaleable way to tell stories and test learning. 

Solution
My team and I started by crafting a structured format for all lessons to follow, and a series of lesson plans we used to co-create lessons with subject matter experts. We used key learning principles to tell a story of each module in all courses. In this overarching narrative curriculum, there were smaller case studies, researching, learning new topics, synthesizing my findings, then building out exercises, anecdotes, quotes, and graphics to build a compelling story for learners. I personally crafted a video production guide which outlined everything from overarching principles on mood and aesthetic, to framing, lighting, color correction, and motion graphics.