IBM Design Language

Project Background

As part of IBM’s initiative to establish a modern design organization of over 1,000 interdisciplinary designers, one of the first priorities was creating a design system that accelerates their impact across 4,000+ product lines. My team was invited to work on this effort from the very beginning.

We partnered with IBM Design leadership to help envision and execute this unprecedented initiative, developing a design language that is iconic, timeless, and scalable.

Approach

My team took a user-centered, iterative, and co-creative approach, collaborating with IBM’s community of 200,000+ designers, developers, and business leaders to define the strategy and implementation plan for launching a new design language that positioned IBM competitively in the modern technology landscape.

Outcome

As a result, we launched a design system that functioned like a shared language for a company the size of Iceland. It is iconic, usable, and extensible. It is both highly functional and a celebration of IBM’s legacy while shaping its future. Teams used the system to create dialects to serve diverse business verticals and emerging technologies such as Cloud and AI.

I can’t believe what we achieved in such a short time. Our Executives from Germany were very impressed. We are so grateful for Liya’s professional facilitation, guidance and her great and lovely personality.

Margarete Wies, VP Advanced UX Design, Mercedes-Benz

Liya James is a highly passionate, energetic, and engaging user experience designer, design thinking evangelist, advocate, coach, and facilitator. She is the kind of person you want in your organization and/or on your team who guides and empowers employees of all “ranks” to transform their business and/or day-to-day work from a traditional engineering-led to a design-led culture that delivers human-centric outcomes.

Uwe Zimmermann, Senior Product Design Manager, IBM

Liya and her team have worked with me on a number of different startups to research and validate product and market opportunities. Their strategic support was invaluable especially in the early stages of developing our ideas. The insights enabled us to make rapid decisions on how to move forward with our business ideas when it really mattered.

Liya is able to quickly understand your business needs, parse the essence of the problem you're dealing with, identify creative solutions, guide you through a process to flesh them out, and then communicate it in a way that makes it seem so simple that you wonder how you missed it all along. I have worked with her in each startup I've been a part of and will surely continue to do so in the future. I can't recommend her highly enough.

Matt Garmur, Product Manager, Meta

Seth Blaustein, Founder & CEO, Dollar Donation Club