HP &us | Launching a groundbreaking MVP with AI Studio

About Hewlett-Packard (HP Inc.)

HP Inc. is a global technology leader and creator of solutions that enable people to bring their ideas to life and connect to the things that matter most. Operating in more than 170 countries, HP delivers a wide range of innovative and sustainable devices, services and subscriptions for personal computing, printing, 3D printing, hybrid work, gaming, and more.

&us has worked with HP since 2019, supporting the organisation as it shifts towards increased investment in software and services, delivering a wide range of collaborative projects focused on product, innovation and cultural transformation.

Our latest project, which launched in November 2023 at HP’s Imagine Conference, focused on one of its most cutting-edge products: HP AI Studio.

From initial concept to working MVP

We all know the field of AI is rapidly evolving. With it comes a multitude of new technologies and tools that require complex and lengthy setups for teams, multiple siloed software subscriptions, and a need for heavy computing power. That’s a costly operation for companies.

This is where HP's AI Studio comes in: an annual license that includes maintenance and support, combining leading tools and libraries all in one place. Providing set-up templates and automation features, AI Studio speeds up processes while helping to smartly allocate resources to enable teams to focus on building and testing models in a cost-efficient way.

Having developed an early-stage concept for AI Studio, HP turned to &us to validate the user experience and redefine its UI, working with HP’s engineering team to deliver the product’s first MVP release. Together, we tested the platform with users and redesigned it from the ground up - resulting in its successful premiere in November 2023, catching the attention of several partners which resulted in a collaboration with NVIDIA for the AI Workstation and several integrations into AI Studio

Applying user-centred design thinking

Conducting in-depth workshops with the HP team and interviewing data scientists around the world, &us began to map the user journey of a software engineer building AI models. This invaluable process allowed us to identify clear painpoints and opportunities.

Overall, the joint team explored and designed two core user journeys:

New Admin User

Focused on the onboarding, set-up and rollout of AI Studio, highlighting team and analytics features to allow admins to manage resources and projects efficiently.

Returning User

Focused on everyday use of AI Studio from onboarding to daily work collaborating on projects, highlighting key features to create, monitor and deploy models.

Key outcomes

Future opportunities for the team to explore

The user research helped validate AI Studio’s value proposition and identified new feature opportunities for the future. During testing sessions, user satisfaction was very high, with positive feedback for the overall experience, the simplicity of the UI and how helpful certain features were.

A better decision making process

By taking a user-centric approach and sharing our progress in fortnightly demos, we created a transparent decision-making process that could constructively challenge the team’s assumptions. This helped senior stakeholders and engineers better understand how a design-led approach fosters innovation, while reducing unnecessary work by crafting and testing designs at pace with users.

Launching a
groundbreaking AI MVP

We helped HP redesign a groundbreaking new platform, AI Studio, to accelerate AI and data science model management.

About Hewlett-Packard (HP Inc.)

From initial concept to working MVP

“The &us team led the designs and created a very clear process with a focus on the customer that enabled rapid collaboration. I was impressed by how collaborative and highly performing the team were, staying on top of delivering easily actionable quality deliverables.”