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IBM Cognitive CatalystAn Open-Source Community Portal for Watson

Won IBM's design challenge with a concept for an open-source portal where IBMers and IBM partners building on Watson could publish and find each other's work.

Company
IBM via Topcoder
Period
2015
Role
Competitive designer. Information architecture, UX, concept design
Shipped
Concept and prototype, first place in the challenge
Wireframe of the Cognitive Catalyst portal, shown in perspective: a hero reading 'We can do something bigger, together, solve problems collaboratively using IBM Watson' with GitHub sign-in, above community counters, three community values of contribute, collaborate and extend, and a trending project list filtered by language, speech, vision and data insights.
  • 1st place, IBM design challenge on Topcoder

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

  1. Worked from IBM's written brief through Topcoder, without direct access to their teams. That is the constraint the format imposes.

  2. 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.

  3. 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 one of my first-place finishes on Topcoder. Another, GE's, turned into more than a year of client work.