Jordan Shade using a laptop
Alumni

MID '14

Product Design (MDes)

User is king, and I get to apply everything I learned while studying human-centered design in graduate school.

News of IBM’s strategic reorientation around design innovation and human-centered design process has reached somewhat mythic proportions in the design world as the organization has committed to hiring 1,000 designers within a 5-year period that began about 18 months ago. And they are aggressively recruiting and training recent design graduates from bachelor and master level design programs; this past summer 100 new designers were on-boarded, adding to the approximately 300 that had already been hired. We are proud to have UArts graduate Jordan Shade working with them as a design thinking coach and design researcher.

Shade describes her work at IBM:

“I lead a small team of visual, user experience and research designers to generate exciting solutions to complex problems in the analytics domain. I keep relationships with development managers, product line managers, technical writers, senior architects, data scientists and, most importantly, users of the products we design. I’m a huge fan of user research (it’s what I studied in graduate school at UArts) and that’s what I try to drive the most in my work now. We deliver designs to our team while working inclusively with all disciplines in an open studio environment.

“User is king, and I get to apply everything I learned while studying human-centered design in graduate school.”