IBM Social Media Analytics
Overview
IBM Social Media Analytics is a powerful tool for discovering customer sentiment from millions of online sources. Businesses are using the power of social media to gain a better understanding of their markets. However, they need deep analytics expertise to transform this "Big Data" into actionable insight. The goal of SMA was to help customers harness social data and take decisive action across the enterprise. The goal of our team, was to make the process of configuration and analysis seamless and easier to input segments to help anticipate new business opportunities.
IBM Social Media Analytics has since joined with Watson Analytics. Check out that integration on the product website.
Company
IBM
Role
UX + Visual Designer
Portfolio
IBM Analytics
Research
At the start of this project, we went straight into discovery mode to do competitive analysis, stakeholder interviews, and generative research. We did have a release date for this project at the beginning, but a were challenged to think of what the long term vision needed to be to get agreement on before committing to what the "cupcake" would be. After some time, we consolidated our findings on the current product and what opportunities we saw.
Strengths:
Deeper sentiment & text analysis than competitors because of how we define the model and filter results
Reporting and Analytics allows user to slice & dice results
Configurability & flexibility
Weaknesses:
The current experience is very manual; the system doesn't surface insights/ intelligence
The results are not real-time, reports have limited functionality and flexibility
Opportunities:
Combine reporting and analysis
Build a consistent user experience across the 3 modules
Author & site-based analytics
Responsive reporting, predictive abilities
Then as a team, we aligned and discussed on what we thought would make this project successful for us and the product. This helped us focus on the outcome we desired not only for us working together, but for our customers who would engage with the product.
“This project will be successful when there is a unified story for analysis based on site, content and author analytics.
Also, when the redesigned workflow makes sense to all stakeholders”
iterations
During the research phase, we wrote 3 overlapping hills or in agile terms, epics that would help drive focus and alignment for our entire team. Below is a sitemap, wireframes exploring those hills, and the start of style guide I worked on.
Final
Again, this was a long term visioning project, which allowed us to think blue sky and explore our limits. In this project I had a hand in developing a new style guide to define the elements and make it easier on development once they were given the final deliverables. After presenting back this final design, I moved on to Watson Analytics to start to see how SMA and other related products could scale together. You can find my work on Watson Analytics here. A lot of the designs and framework created during this visioning project were carried over into WA, with the visual language having to switch to the new brand.
