Tag Archive | N2 Nolla

Service Design Achievement Award

Jan31

I participated in the first Service Design Achievement Award seminar on 22nd of January which was hosted by Katri Ojasalo from Laurea and Håkan Mitts from Aalto. The event took place at Aalto Design Factory. Five Finnish service design agencies participanted in the competition, and they had presented their best projects in the last fall’s Service Design Breakfast seminars. The agencies were Palmu, Reaktor, User Intelligence, N2 Nolla and Diagonal.

Of course the main thing in this event was the announcement of the winner of the Service Design Achievement of Year, but before that we got to enjoy some interesting presentations.

The theme for the day was designing and developing better services – a buyer’s guide. For me this was very interesting because we have just talked with our SID 2013 group about how to sell service design for our employers and for some of us for their clients, and on the other hand I was interested in the buyers view on behalf of my work.

Anton Schubert

Anton Schubert

One common topic for the discussion was that service design is not really anymore just design but it is combination of design, marketing, technical and business competences. Like Anton Schubert from Futurice introduced to us that in the future service design agencies should have competences from each of these areas in their teams to really create value for the end users. He also said that agencies will provide more “full house” services for their clients. Jasmin Honkanen from Turku School of Economics introduced her findings from her Master thesis with the topic “Why are companies buying service design?”, and also she had found out that it is really important to combine service design and business in the future.

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Service Design as a Tool for Strategy Creation

Nov17

In the Service Design Breakfast event at Startup Sauna on November 13th, Laura Invenius from ABB Drivers and Lotta Buss rom N2 Nolla have presented the case of strategy creation using the service design as a tool.

ABB and N2 Nolla - Service design as a tool for strategy creation

ABB and N2 Nolla – Service design as a tool for strategy creation

ABB Drivers, who produce devices that are used for speed control of electrical motors, needed to develop a new strategy in order to create better customer experiences in digital touch points. N2 Nolla was chosen because of their service design approach in strategy creation.

Believing that co-creation is the most powerful way to build internal commitment, they started with putting together right team for the job. From ABB, team joined people from sales, product management, and marketing coms. From N2 Nolla came service designers, market researcher and digital strategist.

Strategy development process started with creation of clear brief. Next phase was about obtaining insights, both internal and external. Regarding external stakeholders, early decision was made to focus on customers, while investors and those looking for jobs were left aside. Internal insights were obtained from the factory tour and discussions with sales and product management. External insights were collected from 8 countries in discussions with end-customers, partners and OEMs.

Strategy development process

Strategy development process

Additionally, they have collected business and project goals, brand guidelines, and a lot of background information like: competitor analysis and benchmarking, customer research, NPS, and market outlook.

Co-creation workshops were the most important events. First one was dedicated to current state analysis; second one was two days co-creation workshop with country organizations, and the last one with the core team was done to finalize the work.

Tools:

  • Personas used to cluster information about customers and partners
  • Buyer’s journeys and gap analysis used to identify problems and challenges in interactions.

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