Tag Archive | design tools

Building Mobile Wallet Pivo

Nov20

The series in the Service Design Breakfast (#SDA15) continued with an exciting topic on November 5th, when OP-Pohjola, the largest national bank in Finland, and design company Nordkapp presented how they designed and developed the Mobile Wallet Pivo – one of the most successful banking applications in Finland.

Pivo Wallet has an intuitive and simple UI.

Pivo Wallet has an intuitive and simple UI.

What is Pivo?

Pivo is a digital wallet application for smart phones. With an intuitive and simple UI, it offers an easy way for customers to glance at their account balance, while simultaneously viewing their purchase history and an estimate for future spending based on their buying habits. It helps customers to be in control of their daily spending and to know what they can afford. Pivo has also integrated loyalty programs into the service offering, such as PINS and Cityshoppari, enabling the customer to find offers and coupons based on their interest and location. Thus, Pivo is a platform for mobile payments, focusing on the purchase moment, before and after the actual payment. The aim has been to develop one common brand for other partners and banks to build on.

Continuous feedback from the customers

A Lean UX design process was used to develop Pivo Wallet, with the continuous circle of thinking, iterating and measuring. Customers have been involved throughout the entire design process. Actually they were involved already before the concrete concept was defined. Feedback was asked from customers based on a vague idea using a video prototype communicating the concept thinking. A lot of qualitative and quantitative user research was made already in the beginning of the process. The hypotheses were validated with interviews, demos, usability tests as well as private alpha and public beta tests. Pivo also has an active user base providing continuous feedback and improvement ideas via Facebook, Twitter and email.

Lean UX process was used to develop Pivo Wallet.

Lean UX design process was used to develop Pivo Wallet.

The UI is the actual product

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Making of Pivo, the Mobile Wallet

Nov12

The Service Design Achievement presentations continued at Nordkapp’s office as Sami Niemelä, Creative Director, from Nordkapp and Jussi Juntunen, Service Designer, from OP-Pohjola presented the story of Pivo, the Finnish mobile wallet application. The other parties included in the Pivo project were N2 marketing, and Toinen Phd media agency.

Jussi started by introducing the Pivo team that is located in Oulu, Finland. It was interesting to notice how much the team had grown since the start of the project. Jussi continued by telling a little bit of background of the Pivo. OP-Pohjola, the largest national bank in Finland, had noticed that there is a need for a Finnish mobile wallet and they wanted to create it themselves before a global competitor steps in. They also wanted to separate the new resulting brand from the OP-Pohjola brand, so they needed to create a new brand from the start as well. This was because OP wanted the app to be expanded to other banks. The aim was to create a personal financing application that offers a beautiful and effortless way to follow and understand daily consumption, and tap into various offers and loyalty programs at once.

 

Sami and Jussi presenting the story of Pivo app.

Sami and Jussi presenting the story of Pivo app.

In the beginning of the project the OP’s Pivo team had free hands to start developing the app and they started to try things out, making prototypes and interviewing people. From the very start the team had a common understanding of the vision based on a moodboard that Jussi had made. They had decided to make the coolest app in Finland. They came up with the idea of “Am I broke?” -concept, which meant basically a quick glance to one’s finances in the form of a graph in the app. To build the Pivo app flat design was used.

Nordkapp then stepped in somewhere in the middle of the project. The intense development time was approximately 7-9 months. Sami from Nordkapp talked about LEAN design and the importance of iteration, but reminded also about the “over iteration” that could possibly happen. At some point you just have to make decisions. With the brand name, for example, they came up with different name ideas like Lompsa before Pivo was chosen. A brand workshop was also held and they conceived four different brand attributes describing the brand. These attributes were; well designed, human, intelligent and credible.

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I’m in Service Design Heaven!

Oct20

Yes, of course. This makes sense. I want to test this asap.
SID program’s Design Thinking session in September 2014 by Katja Tschimmel and Gijs van Wulfen made me realize something I had unconsciously incubated – and to desire further information. Think if we could learn to love our challenges and transform them into innovation opportunities by design thinking and its systematic approach to problem solving.

Why not ask the customers?

Effortless customer journey and second to none customer experience are key topics for me in my daily job. We scrutinize our customers’ feedback, we evaluate our process steps and customer touch points, we think of new service offerings. And yet, do we really know what our customers think and feel during their journey? Could we ask them? Should we invite them to join us in developing our services? How about observing them in each process step in natural environment?

Design thinking is a human-centered, culturally sensitive, experimental and iterative process. It offers an empathetic and visual approach to get closer to our customers and at the same time learn a lot. How to begin? Tim Brown’s advice is to start by asking right questions. One of them might be: What are the real customer frictions?

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You cannot innovate alone!

Oct17

Picture by Leena Salo

You’ve got a great idea, now what? How to get innovation off the ground in your company?

 

“You can invent alone, but you can’t innovated alone.”

– Gijs van Wulfen

 

In the first course of our Service Innovation and Design studies we got to tackle the fascinating subject Design Thinking in an innovation process. In class we developed a new idea to enhance learning at Laurea in groups of 4 or 5 people.

 

Not only did we get a great exercise in team work, but also learned to use different DT tools such as interviews and observations techniques, brainstorming and brainwriting, mind maps and rapid prototyping, which are introduced in Katja Tschimmel’s article “Design Thinking as an Effective Toolkit for Innovation”. In the end we got a chance to present our new service concept to Laurea faculty members.

 

I found the DL toolkit and The FORTH method of Gijs van Wulfen very useful and interesting considering my own work and projects in the company I work for. FORTH is an innovation method for creating new concepts. The chapter titled “Raise Ideas” explains how to develop great ideas and get internal support for them inside your company.

 

Why do great ideas fail?

Picture from The Innovation Expedition by Gijs Van Wulfen

“What’s the use of brilliant ideas if there’s no support within the organization?”

– Gijs van Wulfen

 

Van Wulfen begins his book with words: “innovation is highly relevant to every organization. Yet, eighty percent of innovation projects never reach the market.” Everything might be working for you: it’s the right time to innovate, you are prepared and know the purpose and direction of the innovation, but still the project fails. Why?

 

Often this is due to the lack of support from the management. You might not receive resources to complete your project or the management might not get behind the idea and rejected it. It is impossible to innovate alone in an organization! A great idea needs to be bought by – not only the public – but management, colleagues and employees of your own company as well. Your vision needs to be shared by everyone in your organization for it to be successful and the idea to come into fruition.

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Natural Born Designers

Oct5

The ability to design is undeniably an essential part of human intelligence. Everyone is a designer. Just like everyone is capable of creative thinking. We may not be equally talented at it but using Design Thinking tools can amplify our chances for success tremendously when working on tasks or problems at hand.

Over the span of the two-day intensive Design Thinking course taught by experts of the field Dr. Katja Tschimmel, Design Professor at ESAD Portugal, and Gijs van Wulfen, Innovation Consultant, I was exposed to some already familiar Design Thinking tools as well as completely unfamiliar techniques I had never used before. The course emphasized the importance of visual triggers and sensations for our idea developing process and collaboration within your design team. Collaboration is known to be especially fruitful when the team members have diverse backgrounds and are experts in different fields (Brown, 2009), which put us into a perfect setting for our hands-on group design project carried out as part of the course. Working through the different stages of a service design project within a diverse multi-background team also presented the already familiar tools in a new light to me – as being much more applicable in a business environment than I used to think before.

SID_blog01

Figure 1: Visual triggers during idea generation: Moodboard, Brainwriting, Mindmap

Especially to my liking among the previously unfamiliar techniques and something I will definitely adapt to my professional life are visual and semantic confrontations, part of the group of tools used in idea generation and experimentation (Tschimmel, 2012). Combining and connecting unrelated things with each other can lead to very unique and new ideas. This technique reminded me of a quote by David Byrne from his book Arboretum: “If you can draw a relationship, it can exist” (Byrne, 2006). The creation of relationships and links between so far unrelated things can be an ideal source for new innovations and is therefore a very good starting point for any design process.

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Behind the scenes – Tools in innovation designers’ sandbox Part 5/5

Apr4
Anyone can be a designer with the right mindset. Source: http://vhirsch.com/blog/2010/06/14/people-centric-design-rules/

Anyone can be a designer with the right mindset. Source: http://vhirsch.com/blog/2010/06/14/people-centric-design-rules/

Multidisciplinary teamwork, simple but effective tools, virtual work, visualization, prototyping, design thinking… There are tons of different tools designers can use in their work.

This is my final blog post about the designer tools our innovation team uses in our everyday work here at the UNICEF Headquarters in New York. This time I’ll introduce two projects relating to Design Thinking and discuss how this discipline has helped us to approach things from new angles and to perceive projects from the user’s perspective. Designing with the user is possibly the most crucial part of design and prerequisite for successful solutions.

I hope you have enjoyed reading about our way of working and that my posts have provided you with inspiration for your own work.

Global Design for UNICEF Challenge encourages students to design solutions that fit the problem context. 5 Why’s is one of the Design Thinking tools included in the competition curriculum. Photo credit: Erika Pursiainen, Innovation Unit, UNICEF NYHQ

Global Design for UNICEF Challenge encourages students to design solutions that fit the problem context. 5 Why’s is one of the Design Thinking tools included in the competition curriculum. Photo credit: Erika Pursiainen, Innovation Unit, UNICEF NYHQ

Design Thinking helps students approaching difficult challenges

Norah Maki, our Project Assistant, is also an MFA (Master of Fine Arts) candidate in the Design for Social Innovation Program at School of Visual Arts. Because of her background she pursues design thinking in her work.

Her main project is the Global Design for UNICEF Challenge, an academic partnership and design competition that engages students in coming up with creative solutions for pressing development problems. This year the Challenge is being scaled to include new universities outside The US, beyond The City University of New York (CUNY) that has served as the flagship partner for the competition.

In the process of moving towards the global Challenge, Norah has developed the competition curriculum and provided the students with more design thinking tools. This enables them to approach the challenges from the user’s perspective and to design feasible solutions that fit the problem context. The competition process now includes the following tools to encourage creative thinking from students and help them accomplish all competition checkpoints: User Journey, 5 Why’s, Stakeholder Mapping, co-creation, and consultation with experts. The winners will have the chance to go to the field to test their prototypes and do some actual co-creation with the users: the children!

Tile game pushes people to think beyond current frameworks

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Behind the scenes – Tools in innovation designers’ sandbox Part 4/5

Apr1
2013, New York, The US. 3D printing at New York University. Photo credit: Erika Pursiainen, Innovation Unit, UNICEF NYHQ

2013, New York, The US. 3D printing at New York University. Photo credit: Erika Pursiainen, Innovation Unit, UNICEF NYHQ

The New York University (NYU) students I referred to in my last blog post about virtual work were asked to prepare a 1-minute video to communicate their ideas for the next class. There are so many ways to visualize projects and their components that I can only just begin to grasp the subject in this post. I will now introduce 3D printing and share four data visualization tips from our Design Lead. Nevertheless, I hope this article gives you some interesting ideas to visualize different types of data and processes.

3D printing for prototyping

I guess I had heard about 3D printing before but I didn’t really recognize what it was until here in New York. While preparing a post for our blog I was browsing through our photo database and came across a photo of Chris (Fabian, UNICEF Innovation Unit Co-Lead) throwing in a 3D-printed item he had received from Singularity University up in the air. From that point on I wanted to see a 3D printer because it seemed more like a tool from science fiction movies than a machine invented in the 1980’s. Later on I learned that 3D printers come in many different shapes and sizes.

2013, New York, The US. Chris’ 3D-printed item he got from Singularity University. Photo credit: Erika Pursiainen, Innovation Unit, UNICEF NYHQ

2013, New York, The US. Chris’ 3D-printed item he got from Singularity University. Photo credit: Erika Pursiainen, Innovation Unit, UNICEF NYHQ

From what I know, 3D printing is used at least in our Innovation Lab in Uganda. Also, the Design for UNICEF student team developing modular drones have used 3D printing within their design process. Recently, we got a 3D printer to the New York office: the 3Doodler. Some team members tested it and made cool Christmas trees. All I was able to make was a weird white ball of string (it was supposed to be a snowman). I guess it’s a good tool after some practice.

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Behind the scenes – Tools in innovation designers’ sandbox Part 3/5

Jan22
2013, Pennsylvania, The US. Working virtually in front of a fireplace at a hotel lobby in Pennsylvania. Photo credit: Erika Pursiainen, UNICEF Innovation Unit, NYHQ

2013, Pennsylvania, The US. Working virtually in front of a fireplace at a hotel lobby in Pennsylvania. Photo credit: Erika Pursiainen, UNICEF Innovation Unit, NYHQ

My last blog post discussed simple tools our team uses in our everyday work at the UNICEF Innovation Unit in New York. This time my topic – virtual work – is especially current for our team. At the moment, we are having “virtual January” which means we can choose where we want to work, be it at home, at a library or on the other side of the country. Virtual work is a must to survive and keep up with the momentum in this ever-changing world, not only for us but also for all international teams.

Virtual work is a must for today’s organizations

Working with our country offices and helping them find new, innovative solutions to better the lives of children in their own countries requires effective virtual work. Virtual tools can be very effective in international work, but they must be learned and practiced. Even though virtual tools save resources in terms of time, travel, and money, and offer important real-time connections they are still often neglected by organizations that are not that agile and rely on the traditional ways of working (although one might say that virtual work is traditional work nowadays).

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Behind the scenes – Tools in innovation designers’ sandbox Part 2/5

Jan15
New York, 2013. Sketching on windows gives you new perspective. Photo credit: Erika Pursiainen, UNICEF Innovation Unit, NYHQ

New York, 2013. Sketching on windows gives you new perspective. Photo credit: Erika Pursiainen, UNICEF Innovation Unit, NYHQ

This post is a sequel for my last one that dealt with teamwork – one of the most important tools in design. I briefly introduced our team’s working habits here at the UNICEF Innovation Unit in New York. Now, I will discuss simple design tools that have a much bigger impact than we might first think.

Simple tools, major effect

In addition to two assigned rooms, we sit in an open space where we can choose our working spots daily. Everywhere you go there are sticky notes, sketches, white boards, plans, graphics, process charts, hand-drawn calendars, pictures, you name it.

Though it sounds like a no-brainer, I want to emphasize the importance and effectiveness of tools that we use every day. Designers love tools like those mentioned above because they are great at illustrating the relationships between information, communicating with colleagues, organizing info, clarifying ideas, etc.

New York, 2013. White board and sticky notes – two of designer’s best friends. Photo credit: Erika Pursiainen, UNICEF Innovation Unit, NYHQ

New York, 2013. White board and sticky notes – two of designer’s best friends. Photo credit: Erika Pursiainen, UNICEF Innovation Unit, NYHQ

Chris (Fabian, Innovation Unit Co-Lead) always emphasizes the importance of visualization in communicating ideas, so we draw and write on white boards, sketch books, even windows, etc. Even though I try to be greener by relying mainly on electronic, I have recognized the effectiveness of the traditional pen and paper method. Sometimes it is simply faster and easier to sketch something on paper to visualize and express your idea.

Sticky Jots for those who heart stickies

For a short time I had the honor of working with Rachelle (Rae) Milne, an interaction designer who was part of our team over the summer. One day I saw her using special sticky notes when planning a video with Mini (Interaction Design Fellow whose favorite tools I will introduce a bit later).

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Behind the scenes – Tools in innovation designers’ sandbox Part 1/5

Nov15
Imagine what you can do with your ideas if you could do this out of sand. Source: http://www.wjunction.com/5-general-discussion/174436-amazing-sand-art.html

Imagine what you can do with your ideas if you could do this out of sand. Source: http://www.wjunction.com/5-general-discussion/174436-amazing-sand-art.html

In my last blog post I talked about key principles behind successful innovations. This time I want to share some of the tools our innovation team uses in our daily work here at UNICEF Headquarters in New York to help envision and test successful innovations. Because the list is long, I will keep posting during the upcoming weeks, so please stay tuned. This first post concentrates on effective teamwork, which is perhaps the most important tool of all.

I was inspired to write about this topic when I bought a book for my thesis work a month ago. The book is called “This Is Service Design Thinking. Basics – Tools – Cases” and it is like a bible for my MBA study program of Service Innovation and Design. Design Thinking is all about user-centered design, which is one of the key principles behind our work when innovating solutions that benefit children in real contexts. Since most of our work with country offices is done remotely, we also use more traditional tools such as sticky notes, white boarding, data visualization, and team meetings that at a first glance may seem self-explanatory but I feel deserve to be recognized as well. Let me introduce you to some of the tools that I have encountered during my time here.

Brown Bag Lunch – Rae (in the middle) teaches basics of coding to the team. Photo credit: Christopher Fabian, New York

Brown Bag Lunch – Rae (in the middle) teaches basics of coding to the team. Photo credit: Christopher Fabian, New York

Multidisciplinary teamwork is a tool in itself

Being part of the innovation unit for three months now, I have had the chance to get to know many projects and see different ways of working within those projects. Our multidisciplinary team uses various traditional and field-specific tools in their work. These tools offer the possibility of not only working more effectively but also approaching issues from new angles and enhancing the design process.

As a multidisciplinary team, we each bring different skills and experiences to the table. Effective collaboration comes from understanding the strengths of each team member, and engaging their guidance and assistance on relevant projects. Learning from, helping, and complementing each other is the beauty of multidisciplinary teamwork.

Effective communication makes a big difference for a team

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