Carbonara
The IBM Carbon Design System is the world's most adopted corporate design system, but its massive scale often creates decision-making bottlenecks. Carbonara is a grounded AI assistant designed to eliminate this friction. By bringing real-time expertise directly into the workflow, it helps teams recover capacity, accelerate speed to market, and maintain brand consistency. Created during the span of a 2 week hackathon along side a team of 3 other designers.
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TL;DR
We explored three opportunities where an AI assistant could provide guidance and validation during the UX process.
Across all three ideas, the underlying problem was the same: Designers need continuous guidance and validation, not just feedback at the end of the design process.
Domain UX Guidance Agent
The “Brandificator”
Usability Assessment Agent
Skip to the Product
Skip to the Product
Target Users
Primary Users
Secondary Users
Extended Users
User Research
Najil
"I was hoping there was some digital support or some agent support or assistant support so that we don't have to depend upon another human to ask this question and wait for those answers."
Najil Kunnathur
Design Lead | IBM Consulting Advantage | Assets
"I use Claude or ChatGPT to navigate the Carbon Design System documentation more efficiently, especially when I need to find a specific component, pattern, or guideline within the extensive documentation.”
Kavitha V
Senior Designer | IBM Consulting Advantage
Kavitha
20%
Designers waste time searching for information.
Designers that use Carbon find the most challenging or time-consuming part of the process to be searching for information and documentation.
36%
Designers want conversational peer answers
Designers that use Carbon find the most challenging or time-consuming part of the process to be searching for information and documentation.
18%
Designers lack consistent design validation.
Designers that use Carbon find the most challenging or time-consuming part of the process to be searching for information and documentation.
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Designers building with the IBM Carbon Design System lack a unified, instant way to find component guidance and validate their work, resulting in delayed project timelines and an over-reliance on manual peer support.
The Solution - An Agent for Carbon Design
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for the old workflow
reviewing Documentation or asking questions on Slack Channels
Designers that use Carbon find the most challenging or time-consuming part of the process to be searching for information and documentation.
for the new workflow
Asking questions to Carbonara
Designers that use Carbon find the most challenging or time-consuming part of the process to be searching for information and documentation.
New
workflow
Old
workflow