IBM: DATA & A.I.

  • Role:

    UX Researcher

  • Team:

    Data and A.I., Project Ripasso

  • Timeline:

    May 2024-December 2024

From May 2024 to December 2024, I was a UX Research intern in IBM’s Data and Artificial Intelligence department. I contributed to several projects related to IBM’s new business intelligence tool, Ripasso.

During my internship, my research findings influenced our product roadmap, and IBM used my competitive feature chart in official company marketing. For our work on Ripasso, my two research teammates and I were awarded Q4 UXR Champions out of all IBM software researchers. Below is the portion of my work I am allowed to share.

Project Ripasso: Competitive Evaluation on Dashboard experience

Problem:

Project Ripasso, formerly known as watsonX.BI, was first started in Q4 of 2023. UX Researchers were not brought onto the project until Q2 of 2024. When I started my internship, my team had done preliminary research by interviewing our stakeholders to find out what was known about our future product and users. They found that we did not have information regarding sharing and collaborating in the competitive landscape and therefore lacked the direction to differentiate our new product from the market.

Research Goal:

To understand how competitors are implementing AI-driven editing, sharing and collaboration features in the BI dashboard experience.

Research Methods:

Secondary Research

Collaboration + sharing in BI tools, utilizing both internal and external sources. My colleague spearheaded phase 1 of the secondary research, and I contributed for the first two weeks of my internship by assisting in finding external secondary sources. Also, I collaborated In design thinking sessions to organize our findings.

Competitive Analysis

To help identify market gaps and areas of differentiation for editing, sharing, and collaboration within dashboards in BI tools. While my colleague worked on Phase 1, I led the competitive analysis for sharing and collaborating within business intelligence tools. I organized my research in a Mural, separating the 8 competitors into a SWOT Analysis (Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) chart.

When my colleague finished Phase 1, she joined me in analyzing the most critical features of our eight competitors.

Feature Comparison Table

Reviewed internal sources + external market research on key collaboration and sharing features and created the comparison table.

My colleague and I split the 8 competitors evenly and presented our research into each company in a one page deliverable where we included the top strengths and weaknesses for our competitors as well as included whether each of our competitors had the ability to provide question and answer responses, summarization, diagnostic, predictive, prescriptive, and natural language generation capabilities.

Feature Comparison Chart

I created this feature comparison chart with the 15 most important features for business intelligence dashboards, as uncovered through my secondary research.

This chart is now used by executives in their official marketing materials for Project Ripasso.

The competitive evaluation research was specific to business intelligence dashboard sharing and collaboration features. Still, the research has since informed some of the larger scope of what we hope to deliver through Project Ripasso. When I began this research, Project Ripasso was set to be released as a NPI but was then moved to a New Feature introduction as part of IBM’s current products, Watson.ai and Cognos Analytics.

Other projects I have worked on for Project Ripasso’s release include Configuration for Data Analysts, Dashboard Concept Testing, Dashboard MVP testing, and Analytics Consumer configuration. These projects have all had a mix of research briefs, SUS surveys, success metrics for quantitative research, participant screeners, interview guides with qualitative and quantitative questions, synthesis through Airtable transcript coding with findings and insights, and deliverables involving playbacks to stakeholders.

While I cannot share specifics because of NDA, I welcome any questions about my process and experience.