Tag Archive | service design achievements

#Snapshots and Service Design

Dec19
Browsing through a mountain of photos.

Browsing through a mountain of photos.

“I’m walking over a pile of 900 000 photos representing an amount of photos loaded daily to Flickr, image hosting website. It feels weird to step on photos, on someone’s face, on a cute baby, a guitar… I don’t think I have ever done this before, not in a photography exhibition at least”.

That was part of my customer journey through The Finnish Museum of Photography’s #snapshot exhibition that was co-designed with Futurice, and with help of Tampere University and Aalto University. Risto Sarvas from Futurice and Anna-Kaisa Rastenberger from the museum presented their case for the Service Design Achievements 2015. This was also the last Service Design Breakfast of this year, and what a great way it was to end it at the Finnish Museum of Photography.

Service design challenge

The service design challenge with #snapshot exhibition was to turn culture into something that people can walk into and have an interactive physical experience. The #snapshot exhibition’s objective is to explore how the Internet and digitalization has changed contemporary photographic culture. As you all probably know there’s a large amount of photo sharing websites and applications, and everybody’s basically carrying a camera with them in their smartphones.

Futurice was really up to this challenge, as they wanted to design for public good purposes and make a social impact. And of course it was also a very interesting design challenge. It was different from their typical project as there’s no technical platform, no clear organizational structure in museum, no existing solutions, no business drivers, and no ready brand.

Anna-Kaisa and Risto presenting #snapshot.

Anna-Kaisa and Risto presenting #snapshot.

Walking on a photomountain.

Walking on a photomountain.

How to tackle the challenge?

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Travellab: A Creative Concept for Developing Services at Helsinki Airport

Nov22
Helsinki Airport (picture from Finavia).

Helsinki Airport (picture from Finavia).

 

What could make airport service experience more pleasurable for transfer passengers? Well, you could get some ideas as Kirsikka Vaajakallio and Jaakko Wäänänen from Diagonal, as well as Juha Vasko from Finavia presented their Travellab project at Service Design Breakfast last week. Diagonal’s Travellab is also a candidate for Service Design Achievement 2015 in Finland.

 

 

What Travellab?

Diagonal created the Travellab concept, which is a model for testing ideas at the airport. More precisely it’s a model for rapid prototyping and idea ranking created for Finavia to improve the transfer experience at Helsinki Airport. It’s also a great example of using service design tools and design thinking in a creative way to develop services.

 

Diagonal and Finavia presenting Travellab.

Diagonal and Finavia presenting Travellab.

Background of the project

Starting point for the project was Finavia’s strategy to make the Helsinki airport the most desired transit travel airport and to support this goal the Travellab was created. The project started with a positive problem as Finavia had been gathering service ideas during the years and already had 200+ existing ideas for enhancing the customer experience at the airport. However, some help was needed and the brief for Diagonal was to design a model for Finavia for prototyping and validating ideas in a consistent way. It had to be taken into consideration that transfer passengers spend relatively short amount of time at the airport, approximately 1,5h.

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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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Pivo

Nov5

Pivo is not a mobile Czech application for finding good beer, it’s an internationally acclaimed Finnish mobile system for tracking and predicting one’s personal finances. It is also a contender for the #sda15. Built around a graph, the systems shows the user’s expenditures and works as a reminder of what exactly is spent and where. Two things set it apart from your typical mobile bank app: its focus, and the elegant design.

Pivo

Sami Niemelä (Nordkapp) and Jussi Juntunen (OP) presenting the innovation.

Basically, the user interface is the product itself. As simple as possible, the design plan has from the start sought to create something that only does one thing, and does it well. In one graph, it shows what the designers – OP, Nordkapp and their associates – though most important when a customer looks at his or her (now virtual) wallet’s contents: “Am I f*ed?” Also, it gives insight into more long-term customer needs such as “Can I afford this?”. Continue reading →