IBM Blockchain Platform

Skills
Design leadership, Visual design and vision setting, Interaction design, User Research, Front end development

The IBM Blockchain Platform is a SaaS and Software offering built on top of Kubernetes and Hyperledger Fabric (a flavour of Blockchain) to create, manage and scale enterprise blockchain solutions, whilst maintaining the governance and integrity of your immutable ledger.

The Challenge

Blockchain is hard and is only exciting when you're doing it with friends. Its easiest to think about enterprise blockchain as a series of private networks - much like the DARPAnet of the mid 90's. But that isn't fun and certainly isn't as useful as if all of the blockchain networks were interconnected. Imagine plugging your laptop into an ethernet jack and only getting to look at one website at a time until you unplugged and plugged into another jack, not cool.

Our challenge was this - IBM has an 'MVP' offering which gives users the chance to create a private network, how can we do something new and make those private networks suddenly shareable and interconnected? How can we make it easier for people to start small and scale as they grow? How can we bake in the governance required for a network of 2 companies, that will scale to 20 companies?

Our Users

Whilst the IBM Blockchain Platform was likely to be interacted with by a number personas eg. line of business executives and innovation leads, below are the two highest level personas we aimed at solving needs for:

Jeremy, Network Operator

Jeremy's role:

• To Deploy and run the network; monitor membership and activity.
• Invoke governance and policies to achieve operational security, consensus, trust & efficiency.
• Troubleshoot, migrate and upgrade his network.

What changed for the multicloud release:

• Jeremy might not be managing an entire network, so we needed to also design for the experience of managing just a peer or just running a network orderer.
• Jeremy and Nick might be the same person in a small company, we expected difference in a large firm, but we are keeping the hand-off between developing smart contracts (business logic) and operating a network central to the experience.

Nick, Application Developer

Nick's role

• Write, run and test blockchain assets: application code, smart contract/ chaincode.
• Discover assets and samples that have been developed; collaborate and build  upon chaincode within the public network.

What changed for the multicloud release:

• We realized that Nick already had tools he used, so we brought the writing/iterating into those common developer tools (VSCode).
• Nick may or may not be experienced, so we designed for a range of skill levels and maturity.

My Role

For the Multicloud release of the Blockchain Platform, I led the design team who performed a complete overhaul on the UX, UI, typography, and the visual language.

Since the formation of the new team and realignment of our Design strategy in early 2018, a huge emphasis was placed on creating an experience that provided a modern DevOps experience for both Blockchain Developers and Network Administrators.

I built a product vision prototype which got buy-in from our executive leadership to take the product in a completely different, and innovative, direction, eventually leading to being awarded a Red Dot design award in 2019 within the interface and user experience category.

From a design perspective I helped provide

• Alignment with the rest of the IBM Cloud software portfolio (visual language, common UI library).
• Clear established design patterns of usage, flow, and interaction.
• Adoption of the latest visual guidance from IBM to help provide a strong design base for future product iterations

More info to come, please contact me on twitter in the interim @the_winslet