Marketing Funnel for Apple CoreML Announcement

Apple and IBM combined IBM Watson machine learning with Apple CoreML to improve offline image recognition on mobile devices.

The Project

Design a marketing funnel and web pages for IBM and Apple’s CoreML announcement at the 2017 THINK conference.

My Role

Collaborating with Apple and IBM business stakeholders, and developers from 3 teams, I was responsible for:

Lead Designer
UX Designer
Visual Designer

My Approach

As the the primary designer, I began by talking to stakeholders on both the Apple and IBM side of project and gathering information. I then investigated which pages on the Apple and IBM side that people would go to to learn more about the announcement and product. I mapped out the pages in a user journey to show how people would navigate from one web domain to the other in order to learn more or download samples.

I then designed each of the pages using each company’s brand. First exploring the content and layout using IBM and Apple’s brand guidelines and working with an Apple design representative for feedback regarding the apple developer site. I also worked with IBM development teams to deliver the marketing and bluemix pages.

Our User

Deb the Developer

Is a developer who wants to learn more about CoreML and how to integrate it with her mobile application. Types of Developers include:

An iOS Developer who does not know much about Watson or CoreML
An iOS Developer who is a CoreML user but does not know much about Watson
A Watson iOS Developer who does not know about CoreML

The User Journey: A Path to Purchase

The user journey focuses on what we want the different users to do in order to learn more about the product and drive them to download the sandbox files and try out CoreML. It helped the team understand user motivations, and drove content strategy and design.

The blue highlights the path a user takes in the Apple marketing ecosystem, while the purple represents the IBM Watson ecosystem. The left most section represents the marketing experience while the center section represents the Bluemix Console experience.

After a few passes, I held a workshop with the project stakeholders and walked them through the details the user journey. We discussed and iterated on it a few times until we landed on what we as a team liked.

Designing the Pages

I identified and designed the pages we would need using each company’s brand. First, I explored layout and content, using the user journey to create the content structure.

Then I applied the IBM and Apple’s brand guidelines to the Apple and IBM landing pages. I worked with an Apple design representative for feedback regarding the Apple brand and content structure of the Apple landing page.