IBM Cognitive CatalystAn Open-Source Community Portal for Watson
- Company
- IBM via Topcoder
- Period
- 2015
- Role
- Competitive designer. Information architecture, UX, concept design
- Shipped
- Concept and prototype; first place in the challenge
Context
In 2015 IBM was opening Watson up beyond its own walls. IBMers and IBM partners were building against the same cognitive services with no shared place to publish what they made, find what already existed, or reuse a problem someone had solved the month before.
The problem
How do you give two groups who don't share an employer (IBM's own engineers and its external partners) one portal they will both contribute to, when neither has an obvious reason to publish work for the other's benefit?
What I did
- Worked from IBM's written brief through Topcoder, without direct access to their teams. That is the constraint the format imposes.
- Structured the information architecture around discovery before contribution: finding existing work had to be easier than starting new work, or the portal fills up with duplicates.
- Wireframed the browse and contribution flows, then took them through to a concept-level interface and prototype.
Methods and tools. Information Architecture, Wireframing, Prototyping, UX Design, Concept Design
What changed
The entry took first place. It is competition work and worth reading as such: a concept delivered against a brief, not a product I shipped and then operated. It was also the first of two first-place finishes for me on Topcoder; the second, GE's, turned into more than a year of client work.
- 1st place, IBM design challenge on Topcoder