Craft
I am a maker…always experimenting, always growing, and inspiring those around me to create the best experiences.
The road to creating a scalable platform experience
Context
At IBM Security, there are over 80 different products and services offered. Among them, there are varying user experiences, overlapping capabilities, and conflicting branding. The duplication of these experiences presents a major inconsistency for our users and results in increased development time and cost.
By stripping away the layers of these offerings, you can identify common workflows and patterns that, if standardized, could reduce and eliminate the duplication of development efforts and unify the user experience.
Collaborating with designer Cameron Calder, we started to strategize and craft a vision that would simplify and modernize the IBM Security portfolio.
Contribution
Early exploration
Prior to an official project kick-off, we researched, explored, and formulated a perspective on the new effort. Creating IA diagrams and prototypes to articulate the ways in which we could unify IBM product experiences while meeting users' needs and reducing operational costs.
After a series of discussions and reviews with stakeholders, we soon realized...We are no longer building a single product, but a series of workflows. We need to focus on a platform that would enable our users to scale and compose any capabilities to fit their business needs.
But how do we build a system that could anticipate any sort of configuration?
Breaking down, and building back up, we pushed to understand a workspace style experience, exploring fundamental way-finding experiences, common utilities, the ability to enrich and pass contexts, and a framework that would support it.
Defining a design system
In conjunction with the explorations, the team was collaborating and contributing to the new IBM Design Language and Design System. Helping mature foundational aspects such as the 2x grid, as well as base components and patterns found in the Carbon Design System, IBM’s open-source library.
As our designs started to take shape we worked with our front-end development counterparts, Jen Downs and Simon Finney, to extend the Carbon Design Systems component library to support our security-specific patterns. These weren’t so much a deviation of Carbon, but the next evolution. Our team was able to design and develop specific components that would enhance our users' workflow and provide a modern library for our development teams.
Maturing to an experience framework
A common library was only the start, the experience was more than just using the right components… it was about showing purpose through the choreography of elements that would meet our users' expectations consistently.
Working with designer Andi Lozano, we started to identify how the platform could provide dynamic layering for tailored user experiences. This resulted in 3 fundamental keys of our platform: applications, services, and extensions.
Applications are standalone experiences that focus on solving a specific use case or a problem for our users
Services are global settings that provide infrastructure and are foundational utilities for our users
Extensions are integration points within the platform that enhance applications and enable a seamless workflow for our users
Extensions became the thread that would stitch these workflows together. Allowing us to create a framework for predictable way-finding experiences, common utilities, and the ability to enrich and pass contexts
While this work is still in its infancy, we use it to strategize with teams on how they can break down their current application capabilities and user needs to fit into a wider ecosystem and workflow within the platform.
Outcome
With the effort of several cross-functional teams, our platform, IBM Cloud Pak for Security, became available in 2019 and is now the business-wide strategic initiative for IBM Security moving into the future.
Our React-based, open-source component library, Carbon for IBM Security, is now being adopted across the division, unifying our product experiences. In 2019, as a result of the work we were recognized with the IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement Award.
As we continue to iterate and improve our experiences, I’ve been leading a team of multidisciplinary designers, strategizing future work, and educating cross-functional teams across the portfolio.
“Peter Vachon stands out as one of the most uniquely talented senior designers at IBM. He has an exceptional and highly valued technical skill set that when paired with his visual aesthetics gives him a sort of unicorn status.”
— Liz Holz, former Distinguished Designer, IBM
“I see Peter Vachon as a major contributor to the very important details that make the new Design System uniquely IBM and of high quality people expect from IBM Design.”
— Mike Abbink, Executive Creative Director, IBM Brand Experience and Design, IBM Distinguished Designer
Understand, Explore, Destroy: A story on multi-factor authentication
Context
Usernames and passwords are no longer a sufficient defense to protecting your online identity. Not to mention, passwords are a struggle to keep track of, and password storage services are susceptible to hacking. While two-factor authentication methods, like email and text-based one-time passwords, have become increasingly popular, they do not offer an ideal user experience, forcing users to wait and refresh multiple times before receiving their OTP.
Step-up authentication is a viable solution for protecting your online identity, but the goal remains to make it as frictionless and near-invisible as possible.
The team was set out to deliver the multi-step experience and explore multiple methods of authentication, including biometrics.
Contribution
Working closely with designers Ploy Buraparate and Patrick Chew, my contributions spanned the co-creation of the mobile design system, patterns, and verification experience. Most notably, introducing the craft of creating higher-fidelity prototyping to enhance user research and influence how biometric technology was being developed.
During the process of designing the experience for voice biometrics, We identified many technical dependencies that could affect the users' experience. To better understand these effects, I set out to build a real-feeling prototype to test with users. Leveraging web audio and speech-to-text API’s I was able to successfully replicate the experience in a fraction of the time of development, allowing me to quickly iterate on the nuances required to support the technology requirements for creating a secure voice signature while providing the best user experience possible.
Leveraging these prototypes we started testing with users again. It was amazing to hear the feedback “What if I’m sick?” “What if I’m in a loud area?” “Why do I have to ask this thing Please?”. There were so many nuances and conditions we needed to account for. Would it even be viable? Could our technology support these questions? Could we have an experience that could accommodate all these concerns? The iterations continued.
Outcome
Due to the research findings from user testing, what we expected to be the best experience we could deliver for our users, proved that the biometric method of voice verification wasn’t wanted, especially with other non-obtrusive methods such as a fingerprint.
In 2016, IBM Verify was released in the Apple Store and Android Play store.
“…demonstrated the importance of the craft of design. We are now out to market with a modern, cloud-based identity offering and his design efforts were crucial.”
— Kevin Skapinetz, VP of Strategy & Business Development, IBM Security
“I first worked with Peter on the mobile authentication platform we now call IBM Verify and later on the public SaaS offering Cloud Identity Verify which are key strategic authentication solutions for IBM. While working directly with Peter he impressed me with his leadership, polished communication style, and innovative user experience designs.”
— Patrick Wardrop, Director, Identity and Access management development, IBM Security