Improving IBM BluePages through User Research

Background: BluePages, before it was rebranded as People, was IBM’s internal personnel directory with over 350,000 people at the time

Objective: Improve the design of the Profile page and determine people’s preferences on editing

My Role: Lead User Experience Designer. Even though I designed the user interface this case study focuses on the user research part of the project

Tools used: Figma, Sketch, Photoshop

Impact: BluePages was one of the most highly trafficked tools for IBM personnel and any improvements we made was hugely impactful

Purpose

(1) Determine whether the new profile design is easy to find information on
(2) Determine whether splitting the profile into 2 pages is problematic
(3) Get users’ preferences for three different profile editing designs

Impact

At the time we had a design system called Northstar. Actually, to call it a design system akin to today’s Google Material Design would be generous; it was more like a set of design guidelines. While I had existing brand assets to use I was free to come up with something different from the rest of IBM.

While the iX site eventually went away—the last of its custom kind before the entire company website became templated and managed by a content management system—you can still see its impact on IBM.com today. The short bursts of large type on ample white space, the modular content boxes, the use of the grey isolated background in the portrait photographs of IBM leadership (though not everyone, alas; it looks a bit inconsistent now), and the intentional design of vertical space between elements. On this last point, before it was only horizontal space that mattered but now explicit guidelines for vertical space are in Carbon, IBM’s own modern design system.