Bluemix is IBM's offering in the PaaS market, a fledgling product born out of the IBM Design studio. For seven weeks, I worked in a team of five to develop a utility for the Bluemix team, following the IBM Design Thinking methodology throughout the process.

We were given three hills, or pillars around which to align our deliverables based on user needs. Through ethnography, we realized that these hills and the overal goal were not in sync with each other; therefore we used our understanding of the sponsor users and stakeholders to redefine these hills.

Based on our insights from the ethnography, we began to develop a metaphor for the visual and interaction design of the utility; we sketched out a variety of ideas and we tested out paper prototypes with our stakeholders and target users. Our visual designer created static mockups based on testing feedback, and I converted those assets into an interactive prototype, powered by Javascript, of the mobile version of the utility.

Throughout the process, we had weekly playbacks with our stakeholders to keep them up-to-date with our progress as well as solicit feedback to help our project evolve and develop.

We also defined a broad ecosystem centered around this utility, where the information presented upfront and the actions available to the user depended on their IBM ID and the device they were using.