Responsible Design is Easy When Users Are Your North Star | Arin Bhowmick

Arin Bhowmick

Chief Design Officer, SAP. (EX-CDO at IBM)

With over 20 years of experience Arin, is at the forefront of digital innovation. He is passionate about creating innovative digital products. Having led large scale product development and reimagination efforts, he has nurtured and empowered teams to reach their full potential as well as championed design thinking processes, culture adoption — and inclusive, ethical design practices. Prior to this, he worked for companies like IBM, Oracle, Pogrerss Software, etc.

Regardless of whether you are a student, working independently, or already embedded in a team, we can all think about the impact of responsible choices in our design work.

IBM is a company, which is over a hundred years old, with a heritage of innovation. It is a company that has reinvented itself multiple times but at heart has always been rooted in values and responsibility to the world. One of the main reasons I came to work at IBM was to help influence the company’s transformation to be a leading hybridcloud and AI company and to be part of that journey by leading with designbased differentiation.

Let’s create

As designers, one of our primary goals is to create a world where we can all thrive. At IBM, we practice human-centred design, making users our north star. This inherent responsibility to our users is built into our design process and reflected in the experiences we create.

As Thomas Watson Jr. once said, “Good design is good business”. We believe that applying the tenants of design to drive better user outcomes will reflect in our business results. IBM has a great portfolio of products that serve users needs, and the user experience becomes the value proposition. Great user-centred design improves return on investment, reduces support costs, and increases brand loyalty along with future product adoption and engagement.

Several areas come to mind when I think about the topic of responsible design. The first is impact. IBM is an enterprise company, and we are often designing at scale. Because of this, our work makes a bigger impact, and therefore we have a greater responsibility for the choices we make.

Let’s empower diverse teams

As design practitioners, diversity is critical in how we make things, our design approach, who we make them with, our diverse teams, and the users we make them for. Design Thinking embraces these two core principles:

01. Focus on user outcomes 02. Diverse empowered teams

At IBM this mindset of diversity is truly embedded into our design culture. From our accessibility practice to our multiple user programs, our goals revolve around inclusivity and empathy. Diversity and inclusiveness are close to the heart of IBM, and I believe that we all have a moral responsibility to embrace diversity in all that we do. I share these examples of what IBM is doing because understanding our practice can help you apply these same principles to your current work.

Let’s build more sustainable products

It is estimated that 80% of the decisions that influence the sustainability of a product are determined in the design phase. This means, as designers, we must do our work with more intention. We should think about how we might take a more minimalist approach and focus on getting the user to their goal more efficiently.

A very simple and effective user experience is going to be the most sustainable solution. I recently wrote about using design super powers to impact the sustainability of our product. By asking the right questions and using empathy, we have the power to impact all the work we do, including in sustainability. Some examplets of the questions we can ask to impact sustainability are:

01. How might we create the most efficient path from A to B?

02. How expensive is the path in terms of serving up information?

03. Have we considered the (re)usage of data and assets?

04. Can we minimize the processing time, and get data closer to the source?

Let’s design AI that users trust

Let us continue to build a community where responsible and ethical choices are deeply ingrained in our design practices.

At IBM, we are building software solutions that help our users make smarter decisions faster. We are creating systems that will impact millions of people and that is a great responsibility. In the world of data and artificial intelligence (AI), it all comes down to designing products our users can trust enough to help them make those important decisions. This focus on trust goes beyond data security and validation, it is about helping our users understand their data, providing relevant recommendations when they need it, and empowering them to create solutions they can trust.Our team at IBM created a great public resource for designers to understand the role they play in building and training AI - the AI Essentials Framework. It helps designers consider intent, and data security while focusing on providing transparency and explainability.