My Role: Senior Visual Designer, UX Designer
Project Areas: User Research, Interaction, Visual design, Prototyping & Testing
Project Date: 2017
Overview
IBM Searchlight was an internal tool designed and developed within the Global Business Solutions Group to help IBMers discover and evaluate emerging technologies relevant to their business needs. By surfacing curated insights, expert reviews, and strategic alignment data, the platform aimed to support more informed, forward-looking decision-making across teams.
Challenge
The initial tool concept lacked a cohesive visual identity and user-centered structure. Content was dense and difficult to navigate, making it challenging for users to find and trust relevant information. The project required a clear, modern interface that could support exploratory search while balancing complex, data-rich content in a usable and engaging way.
My Role
As the sole visual designer on the team, I was responsible for creating the visual language and interface components for Searchlight. While my focus was on layout, typography, and UI consistency, I was also learning core UX practices from UX designers on the team —participating in research discussions, user flows, and wireframing exercises as a new designer transitioning into UX.
Research
To understand how IBMers discover and evaluate emerging technologies, we conducted user interviews with a range of stakeholders across business units. We also facilitated remote workshops using Mural.ly, where participants helped us map out current workflows (“As-Is” studies), define user personas, and collaboratively prioritize ideas based on impact and feasibility. These activities revealed key gaps in trust, usability, and discoverability—insights that directly shaped the design direction of Searchlight.
User Personas
Our user personas—Emily Chen, a strategy consultant; Lisa Romero, a technical consultant; and Raj Patel, an executive at the partner level—were created to reflect the distinct goals, challenges, and decision-making behaviors of our core users. Throughout design and development, we treated these personas as real people—referring to them in design reviews, testing assumptions against their needs, and using them to guide content hierarchy, feature prioritization, and interface decisions. This helped keep the entire team aligned around user value and grounded our work in empathy.
Prototypes and Wireframes
With Searchlight encompassing a large volume of projects and complex data, wireframing and prototyping played a critical role in shaping a clear, usable experience. We used Sketch to create and iterate on wireframes, exploring layout structures, content hierarchy, and interaction flows. Prototypes helped us test how users would navigate, search, and filter through dense information—allowing us to validate key design decisions early and adapt quickly based on feedback.
Hi fi and Comps
