IBM
As a UX and visual designer intern at IBM, I led the creation of a project from scratch which involved ideation, design iterations, and learnings that are covered in a comprehensive document. This document showcases the entire design process and highlights the efforts that went into making the project successful.
Project Overview 🗺️
Copyright @IBM Corporation 1994, 2023
Note from mentors
Ayush joined our WKC Lineage team as an intern and has been involved in a project called Relationship Explorer.
The project is very challenging and requires a deep level of understanding that Ayush has been able to pick up in a relatively short amount of time.
From day 1, Ayush has been eagerly learning and contributing to the best of his abilities. Ayush has demonstrated the ability to process feedback, ask the right questions, and autonomously execute on complex designs. He also has shown a strong work ethic and a desire to continue growing on our team.
Michael Mahemood
Senior Product Designer @IBM
Ayush is an innovative, dedicated, and enthusiastic designer whom our design team has grown to rely on. From the beginning, Ayush was eager to gain domain knowledge about data lineage, an existing project, and relationship explorer, a new project that he has become a great contributor of. Once he felt more comfortable with the basics, he stepped in to help transform user research notes into organized observations and findings; these were crucial to guiding the next steps for our product management, development, and design stakeholders. Ayush is not hesitant to ask questions to learn more and ensure he's prepared, but he is also unafraid to start exploring design ideas on his own and voice suggestions or new ideas. This was particularly helpful when our second designer began transitioning roles and Ayush stepped in to iterate new features for the relationship explorer prototype, which would be used for future research. I have collaborated with Ayush on different aspects of the prototype so that we can improve and consolidate our ideas, and I appreciate his abilities to think outside of the box, organize his work, and communicate with polite directness. Ayush has demonstrated that he is a passionate, effective, and adaptable person to work with who will surely bring value to any team he joins
Jamie Har
UX Designer @IBM
Index
IBM Design Language: Consistent, user-centered design framework for IBM products.
Carbon Design System: Open-source system based on IBM Design Language, providing UI components and guidelines.
LOOP Principle: Core concept in IBM Design, emphasizing active listening, ownership, transparency, and adaptability.
2. Pre-Context
The following terms are essential to understanding the platform/software I with my team worked on,
a) Data & Data lineage
b) what are the business needs
c) who are the users,
d) type of data is being used .
Data: Data refers to information in various forms like numbers, text, images, etc., used by computers for processing, analysis, and storage.
Data Lineage: Data lineage is a visual representation of how data moves through different processes, showing its origin, transformations, and destinations. It helps track data flow and changes, aiding in understanding its journey and ensuring data quality and accuracy in technical systems.
Business Needs & Benefits:
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Regulatory Compliance: Required for traceability and gap identification.
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Consumable: Provides appropriate data summaries, identifies issues, and changes.
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Performance: Reduces rendering time, understands potential problems.
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Exploration & Impact Analysis: Understands data flow, impact, and system changes.
Users & Their Requirements:
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Business Analyst: Identifies impacted data for reports and insights.
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Compliance Officer: Ensures data compliance with regulations.
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Data Scientist: Analyzes data transformations and diagnostics.
Main Use Cases:
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Business User Exploration: Explores data paths and outcomes.
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AI Governance: Examines data used for AI training.
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Input Analysis: Understands data changes and downstream effects.
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Data Consumer: Grasps occurrence locations.
Types Of data
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Governance Artifacts: Elements within collaborative categories enhancing data governance. They enrich, control access, identify, and analyze data.
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Assets: Owned or leased items (e.g., tech, tools) linked to specifications. In Cloud Pak for Data, they include data, operational, and configuration instances.
TLDR :
"Relationship Explorer," Is a data visualization tool that shows connections between
Governance artifacts (Data management rules and categories - are like the library's catalog system, where the librarian keeps records of all the books in the library)
Catalog assets (Owned data items, such as datasets and configuration these are like are the actual books on the library shelves.
Each book is a unique piece of information that users can access and read ).
It's designed for tech experts and other professionals dealing with vast data. We focused on simplicity and collaborated with experts to enhance functionality. This tool aids in finding governance assignments, ensuring compliance, and exploring data.
It will benefit fields like medicine, manufacturing, banking, and tech, making information connections easily understandable.
3. Introduction
What is Relationship explorer ?
A graphical view / data visualization and interaction tool of the relationships between:
• Governance artifacts (categories, business terms,
classifications, data classes, reference data, policies, rules, etc.)
• Catalog assets (data, notebooks, models, custom assets)
Why is it needed?
Use cases from research thus far:
• Find the governance assignments placed on data
• Understand the governance meta model / Ensure compliance
• Find and/or explore data
I worked with my team in creating a unique tool, the "Relationship Explorer." It's designed to assist professionals like tech experts, who deal with vast amounts of information. This tool visually demonstrates connections between different pieces of data. We prioritized simplicity in design and collaborated with experts to enhance its functionality. After developemenmt, it will be widely available in various field like medicine , manufacturing , banking , tech enabling people to enhance their work by easily understanding information connections.
These are the lists of sponsored users who helps to get feedback and more
insights.We work closely with them to create the best experience for users.
Current issues and user Pain points of users -
In present scenario users had various issue
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Unusable UX/UI because the graph had thousands of data
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Scope - it was difficult to understand what can be achieved with this relationship data
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Graph Behavior's - poor data viz. unable to filter or sort information
