Sales Manager Support
Globally supporting IBM sales managers in their roles
Internship @ IBM
UX Design
Website
My Role
UX Design Intern
Team
Bontu Gelan
UX Design Intern
Jeffrey Adu-donkor
UX Design Intern
Timeline
June - July 2021
6 of 8 weeks
Tools
Sketch
Mural
Adobe Illustrator
After Effects
Box
PowerPoint
Meghna Jain
Design Research Intern
+ Sponsor Team
NOTE: IBM Intellectual Property
These assets and prototype are owned by IBM. This content is proprietary and protected by duty of confidentiality.
Overview
For 8 weeks, I interned as part of IBM's Patterns program. During 6 of those weeks, I was part of a design/research team with three other UX Design and Design Research interns. IBM's Global Markets, Sales Enablement team was our sponsor team and provided guidance.
Below is the problem statement our sponsor team presented us with initially. You will see the problem statement change over the course of the user research we conducted.
Original
How might we provide managers a community space that allows them to both create and share content as well as consume content from other managers?
For this project, we leverage the framework, principles and practices of Enterprise Design Thinking (EDT). A key aspect of this was to utilize the loop — to continuously observe, reflect, and make throughout our design process.
Below, is an account of our 6-week design project.
Developing Domain Knowledge
Once we were introduced to the problem space, we focused on developing domain knowledge. This consisted of searches within IBM and one-on-one interviews with previous sales managers on our sponsor team. Our knowledge transfer focused on:
-
the structure of sales management at IBM
-
the roles and responsibilities of sales managers
-
platforms they currently use related to our problem space
We created representations such as the one below to capture our understanding. This one details commonalities and differences amongst sales managers' roles and responsibilities.
Assumptions and Questions, such as the example below, was an activity we frequently revisited throughout the process. As we got further into the project and learned more about the domain, we kept diagramming our assumptions and questions to get more clarity about what we know, what we are assuming, and what we need to know and/or address.
We addressed our questions and assumptions at each point, prioritizing those that were in the high-risk/high-uncertainty quadrant.
User Research
Our user research consisted of 3 phases: initial user interviews, concept testing, and usability testing. We conducted a total of 15 user interviews. 1-2 people from our team facilitated each interview, and the remaining team members took notes. I facilitated 8 of the 15 interviews, some individually, some jointly with another team member.
Sponsor User Recruitment
As a global corporation, we wanted to get as many international perspectives as possible, so we interviewed users from 6 different countries: Brazil, Canada, Germany, USA, Ireland, and Italy. Additionally, we talked to users at different stages within their career, which ranged from a few months to over 20 years as an FLM at IBM.
Initial User Interviews
The project briefing we received extended into potential solutions such as "microlearning" and specific content types (videos). Our team intentionally set aside preconceived ideas to focus on what users truly need rather than what was previously thought to be the case.
The first round of user interviews served as a pivotal moment in our understanding of sales managers, their roles, pain points, frustrations and desires in relation to their current challenges and successes with:
-
receiving support in their roles
-
collaborating with each other
-
community amongst sales managers, including pain points
-
existing platform use, including preferred forms of content (mode + type)
Below are a few quotes that capture the experiences our sponsor users related to us:
After each interview, we revisited, modified, and added to an ongoing empathy map we created to concretize what our users say, think, do, and feel. We then distilled the information into Jennifer Captrea, a persona for our user group.
We shared our research insights during our weekly playback meetings, and this helped to align our sponsor team with the same understanding of users' experiences. This was especially important where our research discovered experiences that were different from the original project brief.
Discussing research insights with our sponsor team also helped to give us clarity on the project scope. For example, when we presented research insights related to product knowledge barriers, we learned that this was out of scope.
During our research, we created an as-is scenario map to represent sales managers' current experiences and struggles. The map encapsulated users' pain points when they faced a role-related challenge and could not resolve it on their own and find resources/people to help. The specific challenge evolved as our knowledge of users' experiences advanced.
As-Is Scenarios
User Research Insights
Additionally, we extracted 14 research insights and findings from our user research. Here are two examples:
1
Participants are overwhelmed with both the number of platforms, as well as how information is displayed on these platforms. There is a desire for a more structured platform that allows for intelligent search because sales managers' work schedules do not allow time to go through large volumes of content when it's posted with high frequency.
2
Participants articulated a desire to have a record of the processes used by other managers and their solutions to problems. There's a lack of guidance on how to do a sales manager's job, and while there's a lot of valuable information managers have acquired, it isn't documented.
Need Statements
Based on our research findings, we developed need statements to encompass users' key needs to address. After many iterations, we distilled our need statements from 9 into the 3 below.
1
Jennifer needs a way to quickly find resources so that she spends less time searching for answers to problems and more time focused on her role.
2
Jennifer needs a way to exchange content in a variety of modes so that she can comfortably and effectively learn from the experience of other managers.
3
Jennifer needs a way to share ideas and perspectives with managers outside her immediate circle so that she can more effectively do her job.
Big Ideas
We hosted a research and ideation workshop with our sponsor team to make sure we were in alignment with the need statements we developed and to discuss and make modifications as needed. We guided our sponsor team members through the process of developing big ideas, which we then clustered based on similar concepts. At the end of the workshop, everyone voted on their top 5 ideas based on importance and feasibility.
Based on the ratios of importance and feasibility, we then transferred them to a prioritization grid to identify the no-brainer ideas we would implement and prioritize, followed by utilities and big bets.
To-Be Scenarios
From the big ideas workshop and prioritization grid exercises, two concepts emerged for possible future scenarios where sales managers' pain points would be alleviated. As a result, we created two to-be scenarios, which illustrate users' experiences in the future when potential solutions are introduced.
Near the end of our project, the final to-be scenario became much more detailed and was centered on users' experience when interacting with the solution we created.
Hills
%201.png)
We later established "hills" that corresponded to key need statements and address our users' most prevalent pain points and needs. Hills indicate what a solution should enable users to do, and as such, served to align our design and sponsor teams. We ensured that these enablements were measurable and thus could be translated into metrics of success later down the road.
Concept Research - Concept Testing
We conducted 3 concept testing interviews with 3 sponsors users, two of which I co-facilitated with another intern on our design team. During these interviews, we introduced two concepts to solve the problems we observed sales managers commonly face when seeking support and learning from other FLMs.
Concept 1
Search Database and Inquiry
Concept 2
Community Hub and
We then followed our concept explanations with to-be scenarios as tangible examples of what a user's experience could look like when interacting with a solution stemming from each concept. During this, we surveyed participants' initial thoughts and perceptions of concepts, how they would use it and if they would use it, changes they would make, which concept they would find the most useful for their role and why.
To increase the representation of different sales managers' perspectives, we extended our concept research to include a survey asking similar, distilled questions as the concept testing interviews. We also asked how likely they would be to consume and produce different types of content, to collect more data on a split insight from our user interview.
We found that users preferred Concept 1 over 2, but desired one aspect of Concept 1. Thus, this stage informed our decision to run with Concept 1 with a small addition from Concept 2. We revised the to-be scenarios into a single one based on sponsor user feedback and gained clarity on the big ideas to focus on moving forward.
Modified How Might We Statement
We iterated on our project's how might we statement multiple times. We first modified it after finishing our initial user interviews, and then further modified the statement to the one below - once we understood what users considered to be essential to satisfying their needs in relation to the two concepts we presented during concept testing.
One major change to the statement was to include alternative ways to seek support. Users expressed a desire to seek support beyond the act of consuming and creating content.
Refined
How might we allow sales managers to easily collaborate with each other, seek support and resources, and build community?
Ideation
After concept testing, we modified which big ideas we would be addressing to establish the overarching design requirements. Each team member individually ideated on possible overarching concepts and sketches. We then critiqued and combined our individual ideations.
NOTE: the following sections show less content, as to show only a glimpse of what the product we ideated, user tested, and prototyped.
Lo-Fi Prototype
After concept research testing, we then created a lo-fi prototype using Sketch to concretize the concepts users expressed a desire for and they felt best met their needs.
Usability Testing
This round of user research was very rich with feedback in regards to what users liked, disliked, desired, and more in regards to the solution we created. By giving users 6 tasks to complete during these sessions, we were able to observe areas of confusion based on their actions and behaviors, in addition to what was stated verbally during and after each think-out-loud task.
Below is an example of a sequence of changes we made after observing the difficulty users had when completing the task of finding another sales manager to reach out to, with the final iteration making the interaction intuitive.
During these sessions, we also received a lot of positive feedback regarding the web-based solution we had created, such as how its state of integration delivers its value without adding to their pain point of having to juggle many different platforms.
Hi-Fi Prototype
Once we completed the bulk of our user testing, we started to translate our modified lo-fi prototype into a hi-fi one. We meticulously followed IBM's design system, Carbon, as well IBM's design language with respect to color, typography, iconography, a 2x Grid concept, and more.
Below is an example of one screen where I iterated on its visual design, including the Carbon theme we used (White vs Gray 10), use of color (tags, fill vs outline buttons), and placement of elements such icons and text. For instance, this screen illustrates an overarching decision to attribute meaning to the color of tags attached to content, purple, cyan, and green representing the three management areas of people , business , and client — this was to aid in increasing organization and browsability by establishing a consistent categorization.
Here is an example of the method I went through in which I propose multiple layouts for a given screen. In this specific example, I've laid out the top pros and cons of each layout, which are fairly mutually exclusive in this case.
The majority vote was for the second design to equalize the presentation of content types. If we had more time, I would propose doing a/b testing with these two layouts, as we made a decision amongst our design and sponsor team for this particular change in the design, and weren't able to get users' reactions and interactions with both layouts.
Altogether, we developed a hi-fi prototype with a high degree of interactions built out in Sketch. Below, are a few screens to give a small glimpse into the web-based solution we created.
Home
Experience-based Roadmap
Near the end of the project, we developed an experience-based roadmap to ground the sponsor team after handoff. The roadmap laid out both short and long-term capabilities of the product based on user feedback clarifying what would improve their experience.
Final Playback
At the end of the 7th week of the internship, each design team within the Patterns program presented a final playback of their work and participated in a Q&A session. This was open to all of IBM, and was attended by IBMers beyond our sponsor teams.
Our playback covered our project problem space, the current situation (derived from as-is scenario), research findings, solution (where we walked through the prototype going through the to-be scenario), experience-based roadmap (and metrics for measuring success), a conclusion explaining why this product is important, and its potential for impact.
We received a lot of great feedback from the audience. Below is a live remark from a member of our sponsor team reflecting the growth they witnessed from our design team.
This was a great opportunity to hone in on my storytelling and public speaking skills by presenting a distilled in a 20-minute presentation and 10 minute Q&A. It also was a point of reflection on how much we accomplished and learned over the course of the program.
Reflection
Through the Patterns program, I learned so much about the realm of sales management and was left with an understanding of just how complex sales managers' jobs are, how many different responsibilities they juggle across people, business, and client management — which is best described as having to wear many hats.
I loved working with my design team. We all came from very different backgrounds and grew because of our interdisciplinary perspectives. I'm also grateful that we were able to work with such a proactive and supportive sponsor team.
I'm excited to hear that the sponsor team is taking this project to the next step and pitching it to leadership within the Global Sales Enablement team to fund its development. It has the potential to improve the experiences of sales managers at IBM globally, and make them feel more supported in their roles.
If we had more time, I would have proposed more expansive research, including:
-
Releasing the concept testing survey a week earlier and leaving it open a week longer. We released our survey at the end of the quarter when sales managers were slammed with closing final deals, so the response rate was low (n=12).
-
Conducting additional initial user interviews to increase representation of sales managers from the APAC and South America markets. We were only able to recruit one participant from Brazil and none from APAC.
-
Conducting more usability testing with the lo-fi prototype, and doing a/b testing to get more conclusive feedback.
-
Spending more time on changing small design details. I learned about other UX/design choices we could have made to increase accessibility after taking IBM's "Advancing Accessibility" training at the end of my internship. For example, I would have changed our heading style on the home page to be Title Case instead of Uppercase, as the latter is easier for people with dyslexia to read.
Other Work
© 2020 by Emma Sadjo.