Shixie designs systems that connect product, brand, and people.

After working with executives and architects to get buy-in for starting a new design system, along with dev lead Kai Wedekind, we led a team of 2 designers and 5 developers over the course of 2 years to deliver a new implementation of Carbon in Salesforce's LWC framework. This enabled the transformation of IBM Business Partners (BP) experiences that improved usability, performance, and brand expression.

Today, Carbon for Salesforce supports approximately 20 squads working in synchronously to deliver features and capabilities to our BP platform.

Carbon for IBM.com is the design system for IBM's corporate website ibm.com, built with the Carbon Design System. The library was started in 2019 and currently contains over a hundred components, complete with working code, design assets, and usage guidance.

• Leading a team of designers responsible for the growth and maintenance of Carbon for IBM.com
• Working with development lead and product owner to define whole team goals, strategy, and roadmap
• Helping our system's adopting teams to migrate off legacy systems, and redesign and rebuild using Carbon. From February to October 2021, we have increased weekly pageviews of pages built with Carbon from 496 K to 3,099 K (524% increase)
• Reduced bugs by approximately 80% during regression testing by implementing standardized design QA and training
• Increased whole team productivity with automated visual regression testing, shortened release cycle
• Systematically cleanup and enhance usage guidance website
• Interviewed and recruited designers. Doubling the design team from 4 to 8 members

IBM's website has sprawled over the decades into a monster with 48 million pages. My team's mission is to boldly rebuild and simplify IBM.com to improve content discoverability by implementing consistent patterns, templates, and intuitive navigation.

• Led the research and design of top level gateway pages, including ibm.com/products, and /support and some recent navigation updates
• In a period of 9 months, designed and delivered 4 page templates, contributed 32 components to the Carbon for IBM.com library
• Streamlined user journeys through IBM's massive product ecosystem & services catalog by redesigning navigation, classifying content, and utilizing a clean, systematic visual language

The Commerce team was designing the next generation experiences to improve usability and brand expression.

• Led the design and delivery of a new self-service checkout experience over the period of 4 months
• Raising checkout completion rate by 5% globally, with significant increases seen outside the U.S.
• Created courses and led developer training to adopt the new Design Language and Carbon
• Established and scaled a design QA process for company-wide adoption

The Carbon team is tasked with codifying and delivering the new IBM Design Language throughout the company.

• Specialized in crafting the library and guidance for Data visualization, Color, and Motion
• General responsibilities include updating and maintaining the library of components and elements
• Design Carbon Design System (v10) website and write new documentation
• Create tooling/enablement activities to empower all members of a product team (designers, developers, and product managers) to learn, adopt, and contribute back to the system
• Support users of Carbon to troubleshoot in Slack channels, Github, and in person

The team works to create a unifying design language that has its point of view informed by IBM's brand philosophy, which is then expressed in a diverse range of mediums and platforms.

• Specialized in creating guidance on Motion, Components (later merged into Carbon), and AR/VR
• Supported work on Grid, Color, and Iconography
• Designed and written documentation for the design language website
• Explored visual expressions in above aspects of design – first broad experimentations and later meticulous adjustments – as the brand philosophy refined over time

The task is to develop creative interactive visualization tools for scientific research/engineering groups selected from a broad set of areas at JPL and Caltech. This year, the projects are:

• Spacecraft mission design GUI: a graphical interface for scientists to visually design, edit, and vet the trajectory of spacecraft at different phases of a mission
• Glacier movements: a visualization of glacier's movements over time in Greenland
• Gene interaction 3D mapping: working with Guttman Lab to better understand spatial interactions between genes by visualizing them along a tangled yarn ball that is the DNA molecule

MFA in Media Design Practices

BA in Physics

Brown RISD Dual Degree Program

BFA in Film/Animation/Video

Recognized by Phil Gilbert, the General Manager of Design, at IBM for my contributions on Data visualization for Carbon Design System. The award is a recognition as an expert in craft and a testimonial of accomplishments.

At the 'Adobe UX Leader Summit' with 200 participants, I was one of the facilitators on the topic of 'Growing + advocating for a design system internally' at the enterprise participants table.

A fireside chat on the definitions, values and challenges of creating a Design System for enterprise, with the onset of working remote, with three UX design system pros from IBM, Intuit and Roku.

Read 'A Young Woman Falls In Love With Everything?' on Krulwich Wonders.