Since becoming an InVision customer in 2016, IBM has supported their work with InVision’s full platform, including: Craft, Freehand, Design System Manager, Prototype, Inspect, and Spaces.
Challenge
Working with a global team of 77 designers and thousands of developers, IBM User Experience Designer Spencer Reynolds and Senior User Experience Designer Erica Cameron focus on container-related projects like OpenShift and Kubernetes, which help simplify and secure end-to-end app development.
When IBM acquired Red Hat last year, they were both on the frontlines of designing the first key integration of Red Hat technology into IBM. The transition meant that Red Hat’s OpenShift technology had to be folded into IBM, with the goal of launching a managed OpenShift service on IBM Cloud to coincide with the acquisition announcement—a complicated technical and organizational feat.
From a design perspective, the team was tasked with uniting the existing IBM brand and experience with those of Red Hat, necessitating close collaboration between design and development to ensure a smooth visual merger. On the customer side, the team needed to enable users to easily create managed Red Hat OpenShift Clusters on IBM Cloud.
We have incredible relationships with our developer partners, most of whom are located across the globe. Our team’s speed and agility depends on those relationships, and on using a tool like InVision to share prototypes, show flow boards, and keep track of comments without having to meet every time a design is changed.
Erica Raymond
Senior User Experience Designer, IBM
Solution
InVision was instrumental to enabling a seamless integration of design, technology, and business between IBM and Red Hat. The platform provided an efficient and quick way for sharing processes and establishing new ones, testing prototypes, and gathering feedback across departments and from real users. With InVision prototypes, developers now have automatic access to new work and explorations as soon as designs are ready, allowing for smarter updates, faster iterations, and shorter turn-around times.
InVision Prototype is a fantastic canvas for our team to easily visualize concepts and ideas for the larger cross-functional team. We can then collect comments directly in the prototype, making it easier for us to quickly integrate feedback and push new screens.
Spencer Reynolds
User Experience Designer, IBM
The team is also using InVision’s newly created collaborative work hubs, called Spaces, to keep cross-functional work and designs organized and everyone in sync across time zones and locations. Spaces has been instrumental to streamlining collaboration between design, development, and product management teams by making it easy to group and share work.
Result
Since launching in 2019, Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud users have created and run millions of dollars worth of clusters. Instead of spending hours on complex setup and maintenance tasks related to application management, users can now create a cluster with just one click.
Internally, the team was able to release more meaningful, impactful updates thanks to the streamlined workflows powered by InVision.
By using Design Thinking and Agile methods the team was able to iterate and execute at speed. It brought together all of the stakeholders and centered the design of this product around what our clients need.
Briana Frank
Director of Product Management, IBM