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Damn time flies! It’s been two weeks again. During this time we got awarded for our service design for Säästöpankki and attended UX London.

Best of the Year competition

We got a Hopeahuippu, or silver, the Best of the Year competition (Vuoden Huiput), annual, gala and exhibition since 1980. The competition is organized by Grafia.

We got the award for our service design work for Säästöpankki bank in the category for Service Design / Product or Service concept (Palvelumuotoilu / Tuote- tai palvelukonsepti). The general winner was a retail concept for book store Suomalainen Kirjakauppa. Congratulations to the winner too! Our work was the only digital service in the category that was given an award.

Our design included the whole shebang from customer service process to digital service to information graphics, visualizing the personal economy for the bank’s customers.

Copying is the best compliment. This service was launched as one-of-a-kind & first to market, after which every single competitor has copied the concept, poorly in most cases.

The associated black tie gala & party were fun, and everybody got hangover pizza the following day. Some also went the next day to Forum Virium’s 5-year seminar with a terrible hangover to listen Charles Leadbeater say wise things.

In the end, awards like this are for the clients: they get a glimpse of the internal ranks of our profession and get to enjoy champagne – nice reward of the hard work for everybody. Thanks again for the project and trust on us, Säästöpankki.

This product cannot be linked to, because the service is a dialogue between the customer and bank personnel in the bank itself. You need to visit a Säästöpankki bank to experience it. Here’s few links though:

Description of the award, team & project at Grafia’s site

The bank’s own press release on the award & product

More info on this competition

UX London

Last week we had a team in UX London. Really inspiring trip from Tuesday to Sunday, during which we got the usual brain overload of new tips and inspiration and saw many old and new friends. Conferences are so good!

First Day Speakers (Few notable talks)

It’s All Us (Alan Cooper)

A legend, mr. Alan Cooper shared his recent insights gleaned from working at the intersection of design and agile. A captivating presentation had an endless stream of quotable wisdoms. He discussed how the world has changed from mindless factory work into the current no-collar-worker world, where creativity is required in every profession.

He also described in detail the self-directing “Balanced team” — a perfect & efficient combination of coders and interaction designers, that have both arrived at same position of responsible craftmanship from different directions. It’s all us, there is no Them.

Service Design and User Experience: same or different? (Oliver King / Engine)
Mr. King gave a really interesting talk where he tried to explain what Service Design is. He should know as Engine has been pretty much the first ones doing it for the last 10-15 years.

In his view, a pure service design team doesn’t look into taking their ideas further: they are given out for others to implement (!). His examples included quite respectable work for Mercedes-Benz for example, where they had redesigned MB’s customer experience. This included taking over a whole car dealership for weeks and building the new experience as a prototype there. The prototype included a customer’s home too. For the end result service they brought in architects, ad agencies and what not to craft the whole experience. Really nice work.

Clearly, Service Design is a bit more than “redesigning a big website” as the word’s meaning often seems to be in Finland.

The Behaviour Chain (Robert Fabricant / Frog Design)

Mr. Fabricant presented the concept of a ‘Behavior Chain’ as a way to link together different stages of interaction and engagement across a product or service experience. This consisted of various systems that kept feeding back into themselves, and of explanations on how any real world system is made of several of these interlinked feedback systems. Interesting example was Frog’s work on Aids prevention in Africa by using mobile technology and clever anonymous system design.

Redesign must die (Louis Rosenfeld) [slides]

Mr. Rosenfeld suggested that a massive redesign on massive sites is not necessarily the best way of fixing things. Instead, it’s often better to maximize the efficiency of what most people are already doing with minor tweaks, for example by manually improving the search capabilities.

The Lifecycle of Software Objects (Matt Jones / BERG London)

Matt Jones gave a very entertaining talk with lots of video from Star Wars, Mary Poppins and kittens on robots, trying to give us an understanding of robots and products and what they need to be like, and questioning how they will make us feel when they gain an apparent mind of their own. Russell Davies “helped” Matt on stage by releasing a Roomba vacuum cleaner robot into the crowd. Good fun.

2 Days of Workshops (only few of them here)

Advanced Simplicity Workshop (Giles Colborne) [Slides]

Teppo’s top favorite workshop, where we had amazing discussions, and in groups redesigned a DVD remote control and a central heating system controller for British houses. Giles has a book out too, if you want learn more about simplicity.

Leading UX (Kim Goodwin) [Slides]

A good workshop about managing teams, solving conflicts and leadership in general. Apparently the grief model can be used for leading UX teams and making progress in projects, too.

Prototyping with HTML 5 (Todd Zaki Warfel) [Slides]

The Art of Graphic Facilitation (Sunni Brown) [Slides]

Funny & interactive workshop about sketchnote madness. Matti got really stoked about sketchnotes after this one. A fun coincidence was that a day later we had brunch with Eva-Lotta Lamm who’s one of the prominent sketchnoters out there. Now, sketchnotes is all Matti does apparently.

Guerilla Search Methods (Russ Unger) [Slides]

Design To Refine, Developing a tunable information architecture (Louis Rosenfeld) [Slides]

Rosenfeld went deeper into the topics from his presentation, teaching about content & contextual links, menu hierarchies, improving site maps etc. His method was heavily based on data and how & why people use the service, and making the content so easy to use that people don’t leave the site to Google to find the answer. Surprisingly, language also plays a role how people use & navigate sites. Fabian liked this stuff a lot.

Selling Design: How Meetings and Process Can Save Your Best Ideas (Kevin Hoffmann / Happy Cog)

Good insights on how to make your clients participate in the project, even before there even is a project, and how to involve very large amounts of stakeholders into a big project.

*****
For more misc write-ups and sketchnotes from various sessions, check

http://lanyrd.com/2011/ux-london/schedule/
http://www.foolproof.co.uk/blog/

Next up

It seems in the short-to-medium term we’ll be involved in three (!) iPad projects if everything goes as planned. Some of them are quite huge undertakings so the projects can take a long time to be completed. But good things move slowly sometimes.

We’ve also been doing lots of internal studies for how to best design for Windows Phone 7 and the first project(s) are set to start in few weeks time. WP7 is a clean & strict new framework to design for, and it will be fun see how the products will pan out.

Until next week!