IBM Selected Work
Overview & Target Audience
Developed a comprehensive experience for IBM Consulting Advantage, an AI-powered platform designed to accelerate cloud adoption.
This platform enhances productivity for over 160,000 IBM Consultants, leveraging advanced software assets and methods, including agents and applications, to deliver scalable solutions and accelerate client time-to-value.
View more about IBM Consulting Advantage here.
Designer's Role
Senior Product Designer leading the development of 3 workflows in an end-to-end process.
Collaborated with cross-functional teams, including engineers, product leads, QA testers, and stakeholders, to deliver the product.
Goals
Our goal is to design the next generation of Advantage, aligning it with the current landscape of other AI products.
With the team having operated without designers for over five years, my objective was to simplify complex processes and create an intuitive, user-friendly experience for all levels of AI understanding.
Recognition
Advantage has been awarded the Artificial Intelligence Excellence Award in the Business Services for 2025.
It is the first-of-its-kinda AI delivery platform recognized for accelerating client value across business domains.
Challenges
Continuously developed new features to reflect the evolving AI landscape while addressing diverse user needs worldwide. Prioritized changes that would make both regional and global impacts.
Designed with scalability in mind, balancing the needs of teams ranging from small groups to thousands of users.
Identified gaps in the current digital experience and incorporated global feedback into the designs.
Adapted to the evolving design requirements to improve experiences supporting multi-model, multi-agent, and multi-assistant systems, helping consultants streamline their work.
Process
Conducted User Research across IBM
Consulting users across seniority levels
Crossfunctional Collaboration across stakeholders
all the way from consultants, SVPs, Partners
and the head of all IBM Consulting
End-to-end Design to Delivery with
a team all across the globe
Process
Collaborated with a cross-functional team to gather business requirements and align on user needs. Partnered with product managers and the UX Research Lead to create impactful user stories, informed by industry standards, trends, and extensive global user research.
Helped conduct over 25 hours of user interviews to better understand the current landscape of Advantage and identify pain points, using insights to prioritize new features in the backlog alongside other work.
To align technical requirements with user needs, we map user stories into workflows. This allows us to validate with stakeholders early, before moving into low to high fidelity designs.
Above is a Mural board capturing insights from 9 global IBM Consulting users across different seniority levels. We tested a new feature concept, gathering feedback to refine the design. Based on these sessions, we made another round of iterations before handing it off to development.
As much as I hope my designs land perfectly the first time (in a perfect world), user feedback often reveals deeper insights into how people interact with the platform and where we can improve their experience. Hearing diverse stories and edge cases we hadn’t considered in early MVPs helps us refine priorities, shape future features, and ensure our platform evolves in alignment with both user needs and business goals.
I created enablement gifs to help enable our users to understand how to navigate through some of the new features we rolled out.
One of the features we rolled out was our reasoning and thinking abilities during deep research. Users are now able to see a more concise stream of consciousness and the thought process that the model is able to take while answering.
Continuous Design Improvement
Upholding the IBM Carbon Design System
Improving Design Tools and Design System Interface
Alignment and Improvement
Design System Stewardship: Upheld and expanded the IBM Design System within the Advantage AI platform, ensuring consistency while evolving the system to support new initiatives.
Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partnered with PMs and designers to translate requirements into UI experiences that became core components of the platform.
Pattern & System Governance: Maintained and updated the design team’s patterns and systems library quarterly, aligning the team on standards and driving cohesive implementation.
Engineering Alignment: Delivered detailed specs for new custom UI patterns, enabling seamless integration across multiple platforms and workflows.
Design System Alignment: Evolved platform UI to align with the Carbon Design System and AI Essentials Kit, enhancing brand consistency and user confidence.
View IBM's Design Language here.
New Features & Impact
While working on Advantage, I developed new features now integrated across the platform:
Strong Brand Identity: Designed logos and a cohesive visual identity for the platform, applications, agents, and assistants, strengthening recognition and trust across IBM.
AI Enablement and Engagement: Developed experiences that guided users in adopting and integrating AI technologies seamlessly into their workflows.
Reasoning Models: Built features that made model reasoning transparent, aligning with industry standards and fostering trust in AI outputs.
Team Analytics Page: Designed and launched a dashboard for team owners to monitor activity, model and agent usage, and performance insights, improving visibility and decision-making.
Agent Transparency: Created an interactive chat experience that surfaced model reasoning steps and sources, increasing transparency and user understanding of AI processes.
Seamless Chat Experience: Streamlined fragmented chat flows into a cohesive multi model experience, simplifying tool discovery and improving usability.
Next Steps and Challenges
Our team's goal is to continuously improve our AI powered platform so that it will continue to be a leading example in the consulting world. While navigating an ever changing landscape is challenging, we stay grounded in a shared goal: making AI accessible to IBMers and clients worldwide in a safe, ethical, and impactful way.
Susan Aboelela-DaSilva
Senior Product Design & Research Lead
Eileen Lowry
Vice President, Product Management, IBM Consulting
Deep Dive of Work
Want to know more about the specific screens that I did within each workflow? Please reach out if you have further questions, I'd be happy to chat and show my work in a 1:1 call.
IBM Consulting Advantage: the process of creating icons and branding
Day to day workflows managing designs between our 3 teams and 3 different Product Managers across: Advantage, Assistants and ScribeFlow work streams
Specific Features (ie: Deep research and reasoning, insert multi-models in chat, our enablement piece, etc)
Our Team
Karen Wong - Senior User Experience Designer
Susan Aboelela-DaSilva - Lead UX Researcher & Product Designer
Emma Herrera - Director of Product Design