Elevating Spyre's Card Management Experience

Turning a critical product gap into a clear design direction through competitive benchmarking and creative ideation, in one of the fastest-growing hardware markets in AI

ROLE

UX Researcher

TIMELINE

May - August 2026

TEAM

1 Design Lead, 1 Design Researcher, 1 Product Manager, 1 Software Architect

TOOLS AND SKILLS

Strategic foresight, stakeholder alignment, ideation

CONTEXT

Spyre is IBM’s purpose built AI accelerator hardware that brings inferencing and generative AI capabilities directly onto the mainframe. The mainframe is the infrastructure behind the majority of the world’s banking, airline, and government transactions. As AI adoption grows, so does the need to manage AI products like Spyre cards to bring reliable and scalable AI technology to legacy systems.

Spyre’s upgrade and repair flow was a critical gap within its card management experience. It is a flow that doesn’t exist yet, unlike Spyre’s installation and configuration experience, which does is exist but is known to be consuming and manual. This upgrade and repair flow is critical because it outpaces the installs over time, making this a high priority time.

How might we transform Spyre’s card management experience from a manual process into a streamlined workflow that reflects Spyre’s enterprise-grade positioning?

IMPACT

Through my internship, I was able to impact the team in a variety of ways…

A net new AI engineer persona that lives in our broader team’s persona directory and is actively used by designers and researchers across the organization
A prioritized set of feature concepts and opportunity statements ready for development validation and user research
Clear next steps tied directly to Spyre’s roadmap, including applicability to other AI products

→ Engaged in a comprehensive user research process including conducting user interviews with real clients, a usability study, a heuristic evaluation, and analyzing quantitative metrics of the AppMarket site with Adobe Analytics

→ Redesigned the AppMarket pricing plan by developing wireframes and Figma mockups, incorporating stakeholder feedback to ensure all requirements were met, and aligned with WCAG standards and Fiserv's APEX design system

→ Led strategy meetings with cross-functional partners to push the redesign of a demo within AppMarket to enhance its design and navigation

PROCESS

To define Spyre’s roadmap, I led a 3 phrase process to address this HMW:

Phase I: Domain research - What is Spyre, the mainframe, and who is working on AI on Z?
- I immersed myself in the Z ecosystem to understand the space and the people working on it. I independently conducted user research with SMEs to develop an AI engineer persona, a net-new persona for the IBM Z and LinuxOne persona directory - now accessible to 400+ IBMers across design, research, product, and engineering.
Phase II: Comparative analysis - What does the market look like?
- I benchmarked Spyre’s upgrade experience against 6 competitors across the AI accelerator market: Google TPU, AWS Trainium, NVIDIA Rubin, Groq LPU, AMD Instinct, and Cerebras WSE. I identified automation and integration tooling as a defining gap in the market.
Phase III: Design sprint - How can we turn our understanding of Spyre, the mainframe, and the market into actionable items for Spyre?
- I engaged in a structured design sprint to ideate broadly and narrow down to the most feasible solutions and feature ideas for Spyre. Outputs were brought directly to the stakeholders for alignment.

→ Led strategy meetings with cross-functional partners to push the redesign of a demo within AppMarket to enhance its design and navigation

LEARNINGS

What did working in a deeply technical domain teach me?

The most challenging part of my internship was the domain learning curve. Getting up to speed quickly enough to do meaningful research required a deep dive into existing documentation, AI tools, and conversations with SMEs. This experience sharpened both my research instincts and my ability to ask the right questions in an unfamiliar territory.

1.) Being a good communicator is CRUCIAL. Working with so many different stakeholders like PMs, researchers, Marketing partners, etc makes communication so important, as you need to be aware of how you storytell to each audience. Communication is the foundation of a good UX designer, so being cognizant of how you ask questions, pushback, and respond to feedback is critical.

2.) Take the initiative yourself. As the only intern and designer on this project, there were plenty of times I was confused and needed extra clarification. I learned that it's okay to be confused, as long as I take initiative and ask the right questions. Confusion is just a sign of an information gap, so being proactive to get the right resources is how you solve this problem.

3.) Actively seek feedback. I had to schedule meetings with other designers that were outside of my project to get feedback on my work. I would also voluntarily put my work up in design crits to get other perspectives since I wasn't working directly with anyone else. Seeking feedback when I felt like I needed more helped me enhance my work.

If you'd like to chat more about my internship, reach out at sso9@njit.edu!

sso9@njit.edu

NYC/NJ

Made with 🩷, ☕, 🎧

2026

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