Overview

This whole internship was held in a remote setting due to Covid-19. Our goal was to take an in person sales training program and to transfer it to an remote environment. This was my first experience in designing a service and not a tangible product. My team and I shared and collaborated with most of the work but I focused more on facilitating meetings and discussions, organizing presentations and findings, and constructing wireframes and presenting our users story.

How might we offer high quality client relationship education for IBM sellers in a way that is both cost effective and virtual?

We started off with this problem statement. My team and I knew nothing about sales but luckily, with us all being college students, we had experience with remote learning. We had to contextualize the problem and learn as much as we could about IBM sales representatives. We were given a bunch of charts, excel sheets, program schedules, statistics and information about users. We joined a larger team with stakeholders, subject matter experts, and a cohort coach. We gained design knowledge from our cohort coach and any knowledge about sellers we relied on our incubator team lead, and subject matter experts.

Getting Started - Questions and Assumptions

We quickly meet with our stakeholders, SMEs and coach to get a better understanding of the problem statement and what are the seller training programs like? After this meeting we dispersed and did our own secondary research and the four of us came back to discuss what we have learned. Our secondary research helped us understand how the SAIL training program was seen from the outside and why. We also found content of what sellers are taught. A huge component of the content we observe was that sellers we understanding their clients. We transferred our discussion to an assumptions and questions grid.

Methodologies and Research: Interviews, Secondary Research and User Testing

Our team knew we needed to change our perspective of this problem different than what we have experienced. This wasn’t designing a completely new solution or add on… this was a complete redesign of a whole structure with a brand new limitation.

We conducted user interviews via Webex and conducted four back to back user interviews asking them what their job as a seller is like and their experience with the sales training program.

We got to know our sponsor users through Webex calls, emails, slack and messages. We recorded our Webex video calls and rewatched them to make sure we recorded and understood everything correctly. We all took turns taking notes for each interview and observing any interesting behavior.

For the reason we wanted to interview our sponsor users was mostly to understand what sellers were going into these programs and what was their experiences. We asked about their experience with remote learning and how they saw certain aspects about the program like the class reception.

Overall we were impressed and intimidated! We found that the sellers love this in person program and learned so much.

These quotes should be a good thing right? It was, however, we found that there was so much love towards the traditional structure that there was skepticism towards the idea of making it a virtual learning experience. This was a great opportunity for us to create an empathy map with what we found through our user interviews. We had to look broader with the sale training program and found some paint points to keep in mind and how a remote program can solve this.

• low availability - There is limited seating and people are coming all over the world

• Huge time commitment - 5 days in Boston

• Expensive - a dip in the departments budget

• tough balance - sellers don’t tell people they are out of the office and try to still work

It brought us back to our problem statement and that led us to this question that we spent most of our time answering

What are the components of creating a high quality experience?

We went into looking at user insights with this question in mind and found similar aspects that our users loved. We broke down the categories and found our insights. We created a Interview synthesis board and broke down all our user interview data. We made sure to make a mess with our Mural board.

Creating Billie - Our Persona

Billie became our favorite person ever! A figment of our imagination but the target user we were designing for. When building empathy for our users we created Billie - an IBM Seller for the past 10 years.

Billie tackles on why a seller wants to take the sales program and how they feel that it is not a risk of time. With Billie we are able to understand what sellers really want and this helps us understand what makes a high quality experience for them.

We introduce Billie in every presentation to make sure present who we see sellers are. With introducing Billie to our stakeholders and audience we show that Billie is a passionate and highly competitive seller at IBM who wants to make sure she is doing anything she can to be a better seller for her clients in order to make sure she is making high commissions. Billie talks to other sellers to gain examples of what others are doing to learn from and lastly, Billie wants to show her boss that she deserved this promotion and will be an inspiring leader for her team.

With our as-is scenario we told the story of Billie enrolling in a SAIL program and booking a flight to Boston for seven days. Billie stays in a hotel and attended the course at the Harvard club from 8am to 6pm and going back to the hotel to eat, study and sleep. After a week Billie gets her badge and heads back home to her office.

Creating our Mission Statements for our Design (Hill Statements)

My team and I suffered a rough patch here. Hills statements was a very new concept to us when designing. This is where we see the business aspect of enterprise design thinking intertwines. Hill statements are part of IBM design thinking and are one of the three keys. Hills align our teams around a common understanding of the most important user outcomes to achieve. Hills are compromised with a who, what, and wow.

This is harder than it sounds…

We brainstormed, presented our hill statements and got more feedback, brainstormed again, presented with new findings, got more feedback and suddenly we were in our own loop within the loop. I scheduled meetings with our incubator team, invited senior designers at IBM to our presentations for feedback, reached out to more designers who worked on remote learning programs, and lastly talked to our manager who designed the patterns program in a remote setting as well. Weeks would go by and our mural page just kept growing….

By the end of our mural board we were so close but found ourselves reiterating on the same hills while our prototype was changing as well so with one more brainstorming session where I took an evening to note what are objective curriculums and what are experiences that the sellers will have. I highlighted pain points sellers face and their motivations. After presenting my thoughts to my team and then following with another brainstorming session, we threw some headlines and we wound up with these three hill statements:

1. Help Sellers Help IBM:

An experienced IBM seller can take a new relationship with a client and turn it into a trusted partnership to support revenue growth for the long term future in less than a week

2. Get The Recognition You Deserve

An experienced IBM seller can participate in an immersive course while building internal and external eminence*

*Getting recognition for your work ethic through recommendations, badges, other rewards (to your manager) and getting sent gift baskets for your clients

3. Influence Behavior Change

Competitive sellers are provided with education and practice that increases their self-efficacy which increases the likelihood of behavior change* therefore leading to a widespread client-oriented mindset shift at IBM

* Learning how to apply client empathy in business settings and in client interactions

Prototyping the Remote Experience

With prototyping we found ourselves exploring a new way to prototype a service. We decided to create a schedule of one day and made sure that our users wouldn’t be on a video call all day as well as they won’t be in class mode for the whole day. When prototyping we also decided to break down our prototype with core principles to make sure we answer our hill statements correctly

We split up the work and prototype the features in our schedule. I took the responsibility to prototype how professors can use Webex to hold their students accountable

Here we have a host hover over Billie’s name and bam! Billie’s video is presented to everyone’s screen.

with our prototype we found we were able to tackle all our core principles! A seller is practicing applicable learning with daily assignments and the 2 weeks check in to show how they are using what they learned. A seller is able to be held accountable with the Webex pin feature during live discussions. The slack workspace will play as the centralized hub where sellers are able to get links to Webex meetings, readings, chat forum and any resources they will need. Sellers can ease client separation anxiety with facilitators check in prior the program if sellers will be notifying their clients and then giving gifts to the seller’s clients when ever the seller is doing a great job. Lasting edutainment with having a point chart in which sellers gain points by behaving like a high achieving student and the top 5 sellers in the program will get a glowing recommendation for their boss.

Reuniting with User Testing

Now with our prototypes, we need to make sure this structure works. We held 3 rounds of user testings - the first 2 user testing rounds were to go over our single day structure and our last round was a five minute immersive experience showing the enrollment form, slack workspace and how the Webex discussions would be like.

I schedule all the user testing appointments with our sponsor users and made sure to keep our incubator team updated. I created the final user testing protocol and taught my teammates how we should act as facilitators.

By the end we got great feedback that helped us understand what to look at for the mid fidelity user testings

Finale

By the end of our five week incubator, we had a story about a seller who will be experiencing a fulling fleshed out prototype of a remote training program. We presented our persona, the pain points we found, our hill statements, our prototype and what our roadmap is. At the end we only got one question! We overthought this a lot but got reassurance from our coach. We were so proud and were able to continue into the weekend with ease and feeling victorious.

(Photo caption: one of our retrospectives from a previous playback)

Here is our Final To Be Story

Handing this off

Sadly, we had to end our time creating this solution and handed it off to our incubator team. We made sure to tell our to be story and what we hope for in next steps

What we know 🧁

• Attend/watch lecture video

• Participate in lectures and discussions

• Collaborate with other top sellers

• Complete and submit assignments

• High achieving student

• Better client communication

What we hope  🎂

• Build own platform

• More Client-oriented lens

• Keep in touch with others

• SAIL alumni platform as a resource

• Sellers become teachers

Reflecting

By the end of five weeks I was very impressed with what my team and I delivered. I think we overall had a great prototype and story showing our stakeholders that we understand highly experienced sellers well. While it wasn’t in anyones control but by the end of this program I wished I got to celebrate with my teammates in person. I spent five weeks bonding with my teammates but never actually meeting them in person. This was the first time I felt like this and now I just feel hopeful that I will get to congratulate them in person (I’m going to stop being sappy now!).

If there was more time with the program I would have love to do a higher fidelity user testing by creating a slack workspace and creating a fleshed out enrollment form with interactions on Sketch. Take those higher fidelity prototypes and hold a user testing session for 30 mins. I think our feedback would be more detailed and more critical than our low fidelity.

My team and I would always find ourselves get stumbled and stumped with our hills statements. We would reiterate our hill statements again and again. At one point our hill statements were great but didn’t match our prototype anymore because we reiterated our prototype since our first hill statements. We were still reiterating our hills and after many chats, slack messages and emails we decided to add a third hill. Another bump we found was to change how to tell our to be story with our solution. We had to change from redesigning the one single day to prototyping our tools and features.

Lastly a struggle that we can’t fix, with remote collaboration it can be hard to really understand your teammates environment and mentality that day so I learned to check in and be aware if anyone is working in a distracting environment or is feeling down. A big struggle that would come was to repeat information and talk slower and wait incase our internet failed us.

Lastly, a quick shout out

I worked with a great team and I never thought that we would construct and deliver so many prototypes, insights and findings. Check out their portfolios as well! Yasmeen, Gabrielle, and Justin :)

For more about my adventure: Everything I did as a Patternite