My favorite project at IBM was Watson Trend, which had tremendous visibility inside and outside the company. I led the design and development teams daily that worked on visual design, information architecture, copywriting, and image selection, system architecture, front-end coding, back-end coding, databases, depoloyment. Watson Trend achieved very wide press reach.
The product had an ambitious remit: using Watson APIs to determine what products would be trending for the 2015 holiday shopping season. The app had a twelve week development timeframe starting from my meeting with the product manager.
Watson Trend scanned social media and performed sentiment analysis on posts. Scores were determined using data analysis. The technical approach may have initially led to more of a lagging indicator of which things were being discussed in glowing terms. Sadly, the project was shelved before deeper insights could be generated from further iterations.
In the kickoff workshop we discovered one target user likely wouldn’t use the product, so we pivoted. From there, the design team continued to look at the data being collected for additional framing and context we could add.
We also designed and launched a cross-platform mobile app in addition to the website.
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Watson Trend was one of the highest performing IBM Signature Moments to that point, with 12,000+ Twitter mentions and 125M impressions, which ranked in the top 5, and an amplification rate (“for every tweet we have x retweets”) of 1.37, 6th highest among Signature Moments to that point. Hundreds of articles were written about it.
The app was recognized by Apple as a “Best New App” and was named “Technology of the Year” by the Digital Analytics Association. It was downloaded tens of thousands of times on both iOS and Android.
On a kiosk at the 2016 US Open. Photo: Laura Swenson
Our chief designer produced project stickers and shirts using the Beauticorn mascot from the marketing video. The stickers ended up on laptops worldwide, including some clients’ laptops. When the product was sunset after a year, I made new stickers with a dead Beauticorn mascot.
The marketing video, produced by Ogilvy, was the genesis for the Beauticorn swag. Credit: Ogilvy