Software

The Lotus Connections 2.5 User Experience team was led by Ethan Perry, a product designer and user experience professional. There were 8 additional designers on the team that was spread across several locations including Westford, Massachusetts, New York, New York, Dublin, Ireland and Raleigh, North Carolina. The team also received guidance and support from the Lotus Connections UX management team including Andy Lafleur and Lori Zwilling.

Ethan Perry, product designer and UX team lead

"I've been really interested in how our customers can get the most out of social software - what features we need to include to help end users adopt these new tools and how to make sure Connections is "business-ready" for enterprises exploring new ways to collaborate across the organization. Using the software we develop with hundreds of other IBMers on our internal technology adoption platform has been a great way to identify refinements to the product - as well as working closely with customers to gather feedback from the time we do early design reviews up to the beta version they deployed within their organizations."

Joe Russo, product designer for Communities

"There were many challenges here, and I think one of the most difficult was designing the application integration to let communities take advantage of other connections features while maintaining the 'community container'"

Andy Schirmer, product designer for Connections mobile

"Our challenge was not to cram the desktop experience into smaller screens, but to identify and capitalize on unique aspects of the mobile context and then provide an experience that allows the user to be informed and productive in any setting or location. For example, since mobile users often connect with their work environments intermittently and for shorter periods, we emphasized the awareness features of Connections, such as status messages for people in the user's social network. We also paid special attention to simplicity and consistency of interface, reducing the number and types of control mechanisms and designed an interface implementation that would ensure rapid response times for screen and information updates."

Karl Thompson, UI designer for Home Page, Search

"The Connections 2.5 Home aggregates information from every other component of Connections, and the challenge here was to show all of this information in an easy to use (and understand) way, whilst also using familiar "web standard" methods to ensure end users would quickly recognize and understand what it was they were seeing."

Jason Toth, product designer for Files

"One personal design interest that has emerged within enterprise file sharing is how we as interaction designers translate or facilitate existing social content sharing models into enterprise environments. Even though the core principles are similar, meeting the security, visibility, and tracking requirements of enterprise customers while encouraging collaborative sharing and vitality is a challenging proposition."

Sue Un, lead visual designer for Lotus Connections

"Connections is seven different applications in one product. As visual designer, the design problem I had to face was to understand the uniqueness of each application and to come up with a common visual language/pattern that could hold up across each application. Also working with such a diverse, dispersed and expanded team, and maintaining visual consistency across the applications was a great challenge."

Meng Yang, usability specialist, product designer for Microsoft Sharepoint integration

"Lotus Connections, as an Enterprise Social Software suite, is still new to a lot of traditional business users. Trying to convince them to replace the tools they currently use, or to integrate Lotus Connections into their daily work practice is still a great challenge. Clearly-defined business needs and seamless integration with their current tools are key steps to address the adoption issues. We are continuing to conduct more ethnographic user research to identify those business needs and to develop integration stories."

Jason Baxter, product designer for Wikis

"Designing a new Connections component was a challenge. Much of my role involved balancing the need for consistency (with other components) and the unique needs of a wiki application. Another challenge was scoping the UX work into smaller pieces for development iterations while maintaining focus on the total user experience."