About the internship

My role
UX Design intern

When
May - Aug 2021
12 weeks

Where
Worked remote👩‍💻
from New Mexico

Who
Jandra Aranguren (lead)
James Xie (dev)
Jose Paez (PM)

Skills
Interaction design
User Research
Presenting
Collaboration

During Summer 2021, I joined IBM’s Cognitive Systems Design team where I collaborated with engineers, technical experts, offering managers, and fellow designers to contribute to PowerVS, IBM’s hybrid cloud offering.

At the start of my internship, the Cognitive Systems Design Team was a small (but growing) team. Due to this, I was able to wear many hats—from conducting user research and testing to executing design tasks and pitching ideas to offering managers.

What is PowerVS?
PowerVS, or Power Virtual Server, is IBM’s hardware utilization monitoring tool. It is an enterprise software that allows companies to create “virtual server instances” and monitor their IT workloads remotely (without needing to be in-person/on-premises at a data center).

My Impact

💥 Increasing visibility for IBM cloud products

Users need a whole ecosystem of products to form a cohesive solution to their IT & data needs. I designed a solution to better publicize complementary services within IBM Cloud’s PowerVS offering to help users complete their ecosystem.

💥 Improved accessibility

Disabled icons were not visible to screen readers posing a big problem for accessibility. I defined a new standard for implementing icons to improve accessibility for screen readers and keyboard users.

💥 Simplifying the experience

After being approached by the PMs to design a new feature, I researched, designed, and prototyped the new feature while successfully simplifying and reducing the experience down to three steps.

Work-from-home life

What I learned

🎨 Working with a design system

Through working with IBM’s robust, open-source design system, Carbon Design︎︎︎, I was able to craft digital experiences that are engaging, accessible, and consistent with other IBM products.

🤝 Effectively collaborating with others

From weekly design triage meetings with the development team to pitching ideas to the offering team, I learned how to loop others into the design process, gain allies, and collaborate across disciplines.

⚖️ Balancing business goals with user needs

While completing school design projects, I have free reign to only think about user needs and the project rubric. When designing for a company like IBM, I also needed to consider business goals, arising constraints, software limitations, and implementation.

IBM Cognitive Systems