IBM — Microclimate

IBM Microclimate

Business Case: Empowering developers with a comprehensive development environment that reduces production time, enhances quality, and simplifies deployment.

Product Definition: Microclimate gives developers a unified, self-contained environment to write, test, and deploy microservices — eliminating the need for multiple tools and streamlining the entire development workflow.

Project Goal & Outcome: Born from an IBM Cloud developer’s vision, Microclimate went from concept to MVP in a year. It was successfully released on the IBM Bluemix Cloud Application Platform.

Constraints: At the time, the "newness" of kubernetes meant that actual users were difficult to locate.

My Role as UX Designer

As the UX Designer for Microclimate, I led the user-centered design process, ensuring the product met the needs of developers like our primary persona, Jane. My responsibilities included:

• Research and Discovery: Conducting user interviews and contextual inquiries to deeply understand developer workflows and pain points.
• Defining User Goals: Writing user stories and creating user task flows to clarify objectives and map the journey through the application.
• Design Development: Translating research insights into sketches, wireframes, and prototypes, which were regularly validated with development colleagues.
• Design Validation: Testing prototypes with actual users and incorporating feedback into iterative design improvements.

Design Process

Our journey began with design thinking exercises, where we unpacked the problem space as a team. This collaborative effort involved creating key artifacts such as:

• Empathy Maps: To identify and understand the needs, frustrations, and goals of our target users.
• As-Is and To-Be artifacts: To clearly articulate our understanding of the user's current process and how we envisioned their process changing with our offering.
• Product "Hills": To align the team on measurable product outcomes.

Design Artifacts

After some user interviews I constructed empathy maps to extract insights.

Once I had clear insights into user needs I created a simple proto-persona. (This style of persona was what was widely used at IBM at the time.)

Project outcome

With a strong foundation of user insights and a clear understanding of the problem space, we were able to design a product that empowers developers to modernize applications with efficiency and confidence.