Art Direction at IBM.com

IBM

During my time at IBM, I had four main areas of responsibility: developing design and interaction standards, internal design consultation, design direction and design execution.

As part of the multi-disciplinary User Experience Team, I helped to develop and document design standards for IBM websites worldwide. These standards apply to millions of pages representing 60 countries.

These design and interaction standards formed the backbone of the ibm.com user experience and addressed issues affecting the presentation and navigation of multi-lingual content on a massive scale.

These standards were developed in tandem with the redesign of the ibm.com public website. I was deeply involved in the redesign, which was a combined effort of R/GA Interactive and my team.

My role was multidisciplinary by definition, and I learned quite a bit about information architecture, interaction design, and user experience in this role.

Eventually I became an authority on User Experience topics, and was called upon to review IBM websites which were approaching completion, providing feedback and recommendations for the improvement of the user experience.

Later, I became increasingly involved in all aspects of the creation of consumer and business to business sites, from the early stages of wireframing to refinement of finished visual designs.

My role was very much that of a consultant on matters of all topics related to user experience. I became a bridge between business owners, designers, and the developers responsible for bringing the final designs to life.

I gained invaluable knowledge through seeing nearly all of the designs I was involved in creating tested during extensive user research sessions. I’ve carried the lessons learned from witnessing this research with me and applied them to new work whenever possible.