IBM Sustainability Platform
Project: Concept Development; Web
Role: UX Designer, Service Designer
Timeline: March ‘20 - Present
My contribution:
In March 2020 we began a new mission: to design a tool that would help large organisations better meet their sustainability goals. The project was part of a wider initiative known as the IBM Sustainability Hub, a collective made up of climate ambassadors, passionate environmentalists and sustainability experts within the company.
The role
Being a small team starting from scratch, our roles were broad and highly flexible. I was brought on to lead the overall design of the platform, from initial discovery to detailed design. Throughout the course of the project, I was responsible for the following:
Setting out the initial research and discovery plan.
Aligning us in the early days on our vision, intended impacts and views of success.
Facilitating our social contract and remote ways of working in the midst of the global pandemic.
Designing the initial proof of concept showcase, including stylings, navigation patterns and behaviour.
Helping to define key data points and data hierarchies.
Creating a highly scalable component library and design system, and working with our front end developer to set up a design > dev workflow.
Using our internal user research to build out prospective client personas and subsequent use cases.
Collaborating with thought leading IBM teams to reimagine our experiential vision using Cognitive Enterprise technologies - i.e. folding in AI, cognitive supply chain and asset management tools.
Chapter 1 - Building the team
Building out an idea from inception can feel like an impossible task, especially in the midst of a global pandemic. For us, reaching a common understanding of each other was just as important as understanding our project and business goals. To do this effectively, I set up a team-building, social contract and ways of working session, with the following aims.
Get to know each other as individuals: what drives us, how we define ourselves and the things we need to be happy and healthy.
Establish a team dynamic: what our skill spread is, what kind of work each of us is good at and enthusiastic about, our ways of working and interacting with each other.
Establish a social contract and common goal: our expectations and rules as a team, what we want to achieve.
Our ‘Team Board’, the reconciled output from our team building session. See more here.
Framing the problem
Having set up our remote team, we initiated the first stages of our discovery phase, to better understand what we were trying to create, and what constituted a meaningful experience for our prospective users.
Our First Touch Canvas - Helping us to frame our problem, define success and determine next steps.
There was just one problem; our prospective users, and consequently one of our main sources of user insights, existed within client organisations we had not yet initiated work with. In order to secure their interest, we needed an initial PoC, grounded in a real understanding of users, protocols and the market (see more of this in chapter 3). To circumvent this, we did 3 things:
Identify two groups that could help us gather user insights: a) our client-users’ internal equivalents (respective IBMers that reflected our user segments) and b) client proxies (IBM SME’s working closely with clients that understood their needs).
Initiate research with these two groups in the form of interviews, questionnaires and design thinking sessions (the outputs of which can be found here).
Begin a market research phase where took a deep dive into the protocols, standards and methods defining the sustainability practice and folded them into our requirements.
We took these actions into our next phase of work, which would see us continue building market and user insights to inform an initial PoC.
Chapter 2 - Plan for success
Over the next several weeks, we spun up a rapid workflow, with the aim of producing an initial proof on concept to spark the imagination of clients, stakeholders and prospective users. If we were to gather deeper insights, we needed a visual and experiential starting point; something we could build on, refine and transform.
I started by outlining a projected work plan going forward, with high level work estimates and specific outputs for our second phase.
This plan was then taken on by the team to draw up and estimate tasks. As part of this process, we split our team into three separate workstreams, in order to focus the work:
Business
Responsible for: Team management, market discovery and business analysis.
Design
Responsible for: Outlining the wider service and envisioning the product.
Data & Dev
Responsible for: Structuring the data model and building the front end prototype.
Initial market research
For a platform to deliver value, it had to be underpinned by a cohesive set of industry principles and standards through which businesses could not only reduce their overall environmental impact, but do so in a way that aligned with the science and with mainstream methodologies.
We continued to build out an industry model that would facilitate this, through robust research and the subsequent building of a taxonomy that would inform the entire PoC.
User research & ideation
Through our interviews and workshops with internal partners and proxies, I was able to make a first pass at our user groups; their needs, drivers and pain points. Challenging these personas with clients would become part of our later test plan, but for the moment they allowed us to determined the the bare minimum slices of value (or hills) for our PoC, which would be:
Carbon Tracking - allowing users and businesses to track their scope 1, 2 & 3 carbon emissions across their value chain.
Sustainable Development Goals - tying business’s actions and initiatives back to the 17 SDGs, allowing them to understand what goals applied to them and Why.
ESG Ratings - providing insight into a businesses ESG rating; why it scored the way it did, and how it can improve.
Chapter 3 -Design and prototyping
Over the next several weeks, our visual designer and I set about designing the PoC that we would eventually take to develop with clients. It became apparent that if we were planning to use this to rapidly refine a solution later on, it had to be designed to scale, so, over this time I:
Worked with our visual designer to establish a cohesive look and feel and interaction patterns.
Set up a robust component library and port this to a wider design system manager (we used Invision DSM).
Worked with our front end developer to add code for each of our components and wider patterns to our design system.
Initial site mapping
This was the culmination of much of our prior research, allowing us to outline an initial site structure on which we would build the experience and core functionality.
First designs
We divided and conquered with designs. As I set out the site structure and navigation patterns, we each took a collection of pages to build out, rapidly setting up a prototype that could show key data points.
As part of this, we also created a colour palette and component library for the platform which formed the basis of our visual accessibility standards going forward.
Structuring the data
One of the most crucial elements of the platform’s success was the structure of the data it would contain. If our aim was to help businesses along their journey to net zero, for example, then the value chain and assets, products and locations that comprised it were paramount.
Together, we mapped out our intended data hierarchy and an asset model template that would define what data we visualised in our PoC.
Designing for scale
Part of our primary offering was the scalability of the platform. Knowing we were building out a PoC with the purpose of being challenged, broken down and iterated on, it made sense to be able to tweak, expand and reinvent our idea at the drop of the hat.
Not only this, but the sheer variety of clients we were in conversation with meant a flexible product would help us meet the plethora of needs that we would undoubtedly face.
Final result
By the end of this phase we had a story to tell, a product to show, and a plan of action to take this forward. We were now in talks with several potential partners with whom we would build out further discovery work, and potentially create a bespoke platform that could excel in achieving our initial vision: “designing a better way for companies to understand their carbon footprint so they could accelerate and manage their journey to net zero.”
Chapter 4 - Reimagining possibilities
Now we had an initial prototype to work with, the nature of our client conversations changed drastically. The focus turned to defining the experiences and capabilities we wanted to enable. In parallel to this, I also began to outline our structure for more in depth research and testing workshops we wanted to engage in:
During this time, we also began to make a slow but very fascinating pivot. While our prototype was incredibly impactful for telling our story, the capabilities that we could enable at a high level became our focus. Being one of the largest technology orgs in the world can have it’s advantages too when seeking tech enablement at its highest calibre.
Bringing in new partners
As we began branching out, now only to new clients, but new internal collaborators, we began to realise that the potential for this platform was far greater than we first imagined.
Having new conversations with teams working with cognitive enterprise frameworks, huge asset data models, machine learning prototypes for sustainability standards and more, we began to move our mission aims from the following:
Enabling businesses to track their carbon footprint and sustainability goals.
Providing an out-of-the-box digital platform.
…to the following:
Industry leading AI-driven sustainability insights.
Ways to allow businesses to launch sustainability initiatives that make sense based on their goals, see the projected impact on their targets and track them throughout the process.
A cognitive asset data model that would allow us to match up market data to clients’ data to give them an idea of what initiatives to
Defining the journeys
To better envisage our new vision, I created a series of to-be user journeys, based on all our consolidated research and gathered requirements this far. The aim was to give a first pass at the experience and capabilities we thought would make a service like this invaluable to users, while working backwards with our wider collaborators to understand what technology could enable this.
Next steps
As of writing, this is the latest progress with the sustainability platform. We are continuing talks with clients, collaboration with our partnering teams and technical work to begin bringing this to life. Our next steps currently are as follows:
Build a complete asset and data model (and pipeline) through which we can structure an asset hierarchy for our future platform.
Refine our to-be journeys and design a 2.0 digital prototype to reflect our latest capabilities.
Initiate an official design discovery phase with one or more of our prospective clients.
There is certainly more to come, so watch this space!