IBM Hybrid Cloud
Traditionally, to extract MDM data from its source and to then run analysis on this data would have meant relying heavily on an IT department, even just for simple reports. MDM Publisher and MDM Express makes this work much simpler, allowing companies to rely less heavily on specialized IT assistance and to be able to gain insights faster and at less cost.
During my time on the IBM Hybrid Cloud team, we released two products that work in tandem with one another: IBM MDM Publisher and IBM MDM Express (now IBM Entity Insights). Our team consisted of two UX designers, one developer and myself as the visual designer for the duration of their development up until the products’ launches.
Through a series of design workshops with users and stakeholders, our team learned that for many companies, MDM is the “one true source of data.” It’s an extremely powerful tool, but only if you can harness it. The sheer volume and complexity of this data makes manual methods of uncovering, extracting and analysing data obsolete. But, if companies can leverage insights from this data, it can allow them to better predict customer behavior and preference. For example, if media postings inform a hotel group that a high percentage of their customer base have families too large for standard reward rooms, they can offer incentives on large suites that could lead to increased sales and customer loyalty.
The logo I developed for IBM MDM Publisher
Our team realized there was a need for a tool that could extract data from the MDM hub that was able to be used by someone without coding knowledge. This would make the task of extracting and analyzing data much more accessible to companies, reducing costs and cutting time.
So we set to work to building IBM MDM Publisher, a tool that would allow users to:
Publish trusted data from the MDM hub for further analysis and insights
Pick and choose which parts of the data model to publish for analysis and matching and not have to extract all data within a domain.
Combine data into the same graph database from more than one MDM source
To transition from gathering research into imagining what the user interface would be like, we began by developing low fidelity wireframes, site maps, and prototypes. These would be developed into more mid fidelity wireframes, which would at times expose places we needed to rework, so we would weave in and out of this process—rinsing and repeating. This process continued into the high fidelity stage as well, all of our team working together to find any loop holes or places where our more established frames broke down. Though we were all involved in each step of the process, my main role was to both apply and also expand the now obsolete Analytics Design Guidelines to our product’s specific needs.
This involved, among other things, coming up with the styling for product-specific components not defined within the guidelines, establishing clear hierarchy and consistent type styling, leveraging the colors available to optimize each screen, and managing handoff to development through prototyping in inVision. I also developed the logo marks for both of these products.
The logo I developed for IBM MDM Express
Once users have published to IBM MDM Publisher, they need to be able to search, explore, match, analyze and gain insights on their graph database. So we set to work building IBM MDM Express, a tool that would allow users to:
Perform both targeted searches to be able to isolate the right data collection for their needs
Create and manage collections to organize their data
Combine, match, & explore relationships between multiple different data collections or within a data collection itself
Visualize relationships between various degrees of separation
