Power Team

Part of our Power Team in TCC, 2016

My Project – PowerHA

I joined IBM in October 2015 and been working with PowerHA team since then. PowerHA is a project where we are creating a web app for disaster recovery solution which is currently all command line based.

I was involved with the team since the beginning of the project. I was happy to be able to work directly with the researcher, experience designer and visual designer to provide feedback about that particular ongoing process, to create interactive prototypes fast for user testing and finally contribute in the code in collaboration with our development team is in Grenoble, France.

Timeline in powerha

One of the most interesting feature that I built out for our tool is the timeline. When we expressed our ideas after extensive user testing, the development team was skeptical about it because of it’s aggressive technical requirements. I decided to take a stab on it. I am happy to say that after many iterations and user testing, I have successfully created this part and integrated with the final code.

Iteration 3 of the timeline.

Explore the story

Getting Started Experience

I have created few animations in After Effects for the welcome experience of PowerHA. This is a page that user see’s when they first launch PowerHA. After a lot of user testing, we found out that few of the enhancements we created are not very obvious to users. So I showed my team what kind of animations other apps are doing these days to draw users attention to particular interaction of any app. The team were on board with the idea and I was happy to create all these animations for the product intro page.

PowerHA Video

The idea of creating a video PowerHA came from a simple presentation requirement. Cary Anne, our user researcher, presented about PowerHA to our stakeholders. Few of them could not make the presentation. They asked if we recorded the session. Also at the same time a blog post was about to be posted about user research. So, I proposed to create a video and all my team members were on board. We quickly shot and put together a video in 3 days during October 2015. Interestingly we ended up using the video as an introduction in many presentations. We came a long way in our project since then and we created a second version that you see here. We had fun making it as well!

Prototypes for Interaction research

Prototype of the main navigation menu and its animations

Prototype showing the pop up message and icon animation when a action is performed.

Prototype showing the behaviour of a sticky header in our event table in firefox

Prototype showing a smaller scoreboard when a user scrolls up.

Prototype showing a smaller header on scroll.

Prototype showing adding menu item animation in the main navigation.

Weakan Board

We as a team was having some difficulties to track out everyday tasks. We were also having problems finding out who is working on what on a particular day. I felt the need for some kind of task management tool that is not very biased towards hardcore developers and more visual. After presenting couple of options to the team, we liked Wekan. I have set it up in IBM’s Raleigh server. We are using this everyday to track our progress easily.

Workshop Facilitation

When I learned about IBM’s design thinking process, I really got interested about that. Soon I found out that members of our team regularly facilitates these workshops to help other teams and to introduce design thinking to their projects. I knew wanted to be a facilitator. So I attended 4 of the workshops as a observer. Then I co-facilitated 3 workshops with my team members and finally I am listed as a full-phase facilitator in our list. I am very proud of my achievement in this area.

Other Activities in IBM

I actively took part in IBM SXSW 2016. I volunteered for the fun posted note survey “Is privacy dead?”. I attend our FEDucation regularly and I like to take part of fun event like dessert contest!

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“Iffy is a very easy going, considerate person who works exceedingly well in groups. He is calm, able to handle internal political issues and strong personalities, and is always positive and pleasant.”

Timothy J. O’Keefe

Team Lead, PowerHA

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