• Grad School •
In the Master's in Graphic Design program at NC State, I was introduced to design theory. There, I was encouraged to do research, develop an informed design strategy, and then conduct lots of small studies to explore my assumptions.
I graduated with a passion for social media and the ethical duties we have designing mediated experiences that affect people's lives. I also left with a pretty pretentious vocabulary (kidding).
• IBM •
In 2011, I got a job offer from IBM to work in the Collaboration Solutions Group designing enterprise collaboration software, like communities, email, files, and chat. This was the first time I was defined as a User Experience Designer—a perfect fit that came with the freedom to try different design thinking approaches and push on the boundaries of innovation through our products.
“Without a framework, it’s all random behavior.” - Phil Gilbert
“A problem well-stated is a problem half-solved.” - Charles Kettering
• Profiles •
IBM had a 10 year old Profiles service that was in need of a massive facelift. We leveraged existing technology to design a new user-centric product, with an understanding of how we wanted to differentiate moving forward.
2017 - 2018 / Laura Rodriguez (Design Lead/UX/Visual Design), Sue Un (UX/Visual Design), Stephanie Huston (UX/Visual Design), Sonal Starr (UXR)
• Designing for Cognitive (AI) •
Cognitive (or artificial intelligence as it's more commonly known outside of IBM) was an area I had the opportunity to build subject matter expertise.
As the cognitive design lead, it was my role to understand the potential for the technology and how our organization could strategically leverage it across our portfolio of products.
2017 / Laura Rodriguez (Design Lead/UX), Stephanie Huston (UX/Visual Design)
2014 / Laura Rodriguez (Design Lead, UX, Research), based on “mantras” coming out of group design investigations
• Keynote Demos •
2017 / Keynote Demo at IBM Connect 2017
"Redefine Everyday Work with IBM and Ecosystem Technology"
2016 / Keynote Demo at World of Watson
"The Future of Work with Watson: Build Tomorrow’s Workplace Today with the Magic of Cognitive"
2022 / Project Invent Demo Day Keynote (Link)
• Journey into IBM Hybrid Cloud / Red Hat •
During my time as the design lead for a new product, Red Hat Advanced Container Management for Kubernetes, I happily working alongside Product Management and Engineering to re-imagine the future of app modernization by creating graphical user interfaces from command line workflows. Red Hat is an amazing organization dedicated to changing the world by leveraging agile and design thinking methodologies, so I worked hard to understand our end-user’s motivations and obstacles to help them achieve their goals in less time—with higher-impact!
2020 / Laura Rodriguez (Design Lead, Research), leveraging existing IBM research and Red Hat stakeholder input
2020 / Laura Rodriguez (Design Lead, UX), John Swanke (UX, Dev), Jacki Wakin (Visual Design)
Our Governance product area offers a best-in-class experience. monitoring the security of your clusters across cloud providers. I really benefited from the guidance of my development team members to create the best experience for our Security Operations users monitoring and creating policies.
2020 / Observability Workshop: Laura Rodriguez (Facilitator), Jacki Wakin (Facilitator), Joy Jean (Facilitator)
We had the opportunity to kick-off a new Observability effort with a 2-day virtual design thinking workshop. It was the first time Red Hat designers, developers, architects, and product managers participated in this kind of workshop, so I shared an overview of the workshop’s structure to help with asynchronous education.
2019 / Laura Rodriguez (Design Lead, UX, Storyboard), Roosevelt Faulkner (UXR, Storyboard), Esther Kim (UX, Illustrations)
