This design camp is on 2nd — 3rd of April 2013. We will go through the whole Windows 8 UX design framework: navigation, contracts, layout, branding, Snap Views, Live Tiles, Touch, Animation — you name it. Coming out of it you’ll be ready to tackle an app market and ecosystem that has reached 60 Million users in just few months after its launch.

The days will consist of design presentations that are followed by labs. In the labs you will design your own application — putting the new knowledge directly into use. Remember to bring an idea for an app with you. You can work as a small team too. We’d prefer only max two people from a company. This event is mostly geared towards UI and UX designers.

NOTE: This event was overbooked in two hours (!), so we are doing a second one! The date of the second one is still to be confirmed, but we are aiming for 25th — 26th of April. That’s two design camps in April.

If you want to secure your spot in the second camp, what you need to do now, is sign up for the waiting list of the first event. You’ll end up on the waiting list for the second event in the process. You’ll be informed over email about confirmed date.

UPDATED LINK — There is now a different & new registration site for the second event at: http://aka.ms/UXCamp2. You need to sign up in there if you want to get in. Be quick.

First, a sincere thanks to everyone who sent in an application. We met many of you, and actually had really good conversations with most of the invited. The first* part of our recruitment process was decided just a little over week ago, and we invited Mikko to start right away. Since he just finished his master’s degree at Aalto’s International Design Business Management-programme, our timing was near perfect.

Despite being a fresh graduate, Mikko brings to the table experience from old Finnish internet giant Satama Interactive, and also at Trainer’s House after the merger. Most recently he worked at Outotec, a Finnish corporation who are the global leader in minerals and metals processing technology.

With us, Mikko has started applying his design thinking already on cases dealing with UX strategy and service design for online sales processes. Welcome, and good luck!

Recruitment update

Like hinted in the beginning, 2013 is looking pretty busy so far. That’s why we’ve decided to hire at least another designer right away. What we’re looking for now is mid- to senior visual interaction designer. Someone who’s not afraid of diving in head first into production work, but loves to take lead with his/her craft as well. We’re now going through once more the applications sent in already, but welcome new one as well. So if you’re interested of working with the best design office around, do shoot us an email and let’s take it from there. The old specs apply, but with a bit more leeway on the experience.

First, you have to be a really good designer. By “good designer”, we mean things like experience in years, point of view on what you do and experience in variety of work — in media and type. As an organization we are rather flat and have very low tolerance for nonsense so you have able to articulate what and why you do what you do.

It’s a cliche, but we want the A-level people, no less — you need to be a self-starter and a finisher with a point of view on your work. A practicing craftsman or a -woman who enjoys what they do and possesses curiosity for the world and the desire to be better designer every day. You have to be comfortable with client contact and collaborative way of working, sometimes at the office, sometimes at our client’s. Depending on the project there might be a fair deal of travel, too.

We work mostly in digital— meaning on at least 80% of your time you’ll get to work on things like web services, mobile apps, touch UIs and so forth. The remaining 20% could be on more intangible things like strategy, brand etc.

Second, an ability to cope with abstract ideas and switch between the craft and strategic/conceptual thinking is greatly appreciated. Actually enjoying the various states of ambiguity of a new project and willingness to take the lead on making things real is a definite plus. Ideally you have experience on working with new product development from the early idea to delivery and everything in between.

Third, you have to understand both technology and the people you’re designing for. Being able to prototype and (to some extent) build what you design is even better. In anything from cardboard to code.

What’s in it for you?

In return we’ll offer you a good variety of ambitious projects ranging from software products to startups services and experimental technology. We work for startups, corporations and the public sector on strategy, concept design, products and services on all imaginable platforms. Our designers are aligned with the sales team to ensure we sell the things we want to work on, too.

We consider ourselves to be the best studio around the Nordics so you’ll be in a good company in terms of personal development. Our goal is to be among the best of what we do on a global scale, so there will be no one stopping you to do the best work of your career. There’s very little bureaucracy here, good tools & toys to play around, flexible hours, and only thing that counts is the results of your work.

The working language in the studio is English if required, and projects are about 50/50. International applicants welcome, let’s make things work for you.

How to apply?

If you like the sound of what you just read, send us an email at work@nordkapp.fi and let’s take it from there. Please include your current work samples, cv or a Linkedin profile and any other URLs we should know about.

Deadline for applications is Sunday January 27th. Expect an answer from us by the end of the following week from the deadline.

The small print: At this time, we are NOT looking a narrow specialist but a T-shaped person, with a strong primary skillset and experience and curiosity towards the world and other disciplines. The finer details of your job will depend on who you are and what you do. Please note at this time we are NOT looking for juniors or trainees either.. Sorry, there will be separate opportunities later.

There’s too many things and projects that have been done, that I can’t tell in detail about all of them or this post will never end. In short, we’ve been working at least in the following fields: telecom network management, hospital concept service design, eBooks, new kind of gaming concepts, Windows 8, IPTV/VOD, medical research, concepts for the energy industry and banking. Phew.

Those were for big companies. In addition to them, we’ve also helped a nice group of startups that are building products for document management, fashion, social reading, new kind of advertising, healthcare, and so on.

Windows 8 Launch with Finnair

You might have seen that Finnair, the national Finnish airliner company, released a new Windows 8 application in collaboration with us. The Finnair app was be one of the center pieces of Microsoft’s Scandinavian Windows 8 launch campaign.

Read more in a special blog post about the process & thinking behind the app.

In addition to this rare public case, there have been and are a few other Windows 8 projects going on. Sadly we can’t say anything about them. Let’s just say that they’re heavily in the content & media consumption area.

Wowzapp 2012

Sami and Teppo also participated in WOWZAPP 2012, a zombie themed 24h Microsoft Hackathon. Wowzapp consisted globally of 16 000 students. All hacking away for 24 hours in their own local events. The Finnish event was in Dipoli and had 500 developers coding with the force of energy drinks. We were working with a quite talented punch of students and ended up in Microsoft’s Channel 9 video report of the Finnish event. Spot me with the coders in the end of the clip, at the 5:55 minute mark. See also photos of the event in my Flickr.

It was a memorable experience. Especially the following day was full of laughter and stupid jokes as we were so sleep deprived (our devs much more than us). Our app gathered a lot of attention and it is pretty cool for 24h product I have to say. Good times.

Launch of a Big Web Service

Finlex.fi was launched. It’s been some time in the making. Design & some of frontend implementation was done by Nordkappers Aki, Matti and Jukka.

Finlex is a really longstanding digital service. The database originates from back in 1972, and now consists of more than 40 databases. At one point in history parts of Finlex were published on diskette (!). Finlex was launched to the internet in 1997, so it’s already a 15 year old service. It was last time refreshed in 2004.

It’s an example of how a public web service can be beautiful and usable and not such a horrid mess they too often are. Congrats to the team for finally seeing this online. You can read more about this service (in Finnish) in their launch post.

Until next time.

Frequent followers of our work read a few weeks back Teppo visited Microsoft in Redmond on some training on how to develop Windows applications right. Obviously that is not all — since the summer we’ve been working on a few concrete cases as well and first one to see the light of the day is Finnair Windows 8 application. The Finnair app will be one of the centerpieces of Microsoft’s Scandinavian Windows 8 launch campaign.

“We at Finnair are always excited to find new ways to bring our services closer to users as well as make sure our offers and fantastic destinations are presented in fun and innovative environments. When we started to build the first version of our app just a couple of weeks ago, I was sure we will create something really cool and I was not wrong – it has been great to work with these guys who are not afraid of challenging customer’s views as well as make sure customer’s wishes turn out exactly as planned” says Anssi Partanen, manager for digital marketing at Finnair’s Global Brand and Marketing Communications.

Designing tablets first

The world is changing, and mobile is fast becoming the dominant medium people will browse the web. This is why we designed our app tablet first, optimized to swiping and direct touch.

The app is obviously just a part of a longer journey towards a comprehensive mobile airline experience. When we started the project in early September, one of the things we realized soon we’re dealing with something completely new in terms of usage, behaviour and content; while the desktop/tablet/mobile -arch of Windows 8 platform opens up a whole new possibilities for brands and services, it also challenges the way current content management structures work.

For Finnair, we solved this by doing quite a bit of proprietary content based on their current content structure online. And as an app should have a a few viable use cases, we even managed to get our app talking to Amadeus backend so the Finnair customers can book flights and manage their checkins effortlessly from their tablet or a desktop. For the development, we partnered with a Helsinki-based software house Futurice.

On being best at something

Every Windows 8 app should be best at something, and the thing Finnair app v1.0 excels is bringing the Finnair experience to a completely new platform. Finnair hasn’t had any online mobile apps before Windows 8, so our app is designed to be a proving ground for dedicated platforms in general.

In our app design we analyzed the core tasks of looking for, booking and preparing 
for a trip and brought the current online elements into a coherent and above all enjoyable experience. In addition to these functional aspects, we took advantage of the platform’s capabilities to communicate key stories to Finnair’s customers in a new and exciting way. 

As platform, one thing Windows 8 does really well is the visual experience. The absence of chrome on the UI means the content has a whole new different role: for example, using full screen images feels quite natural when designing the platform. Also, designing the Modern UI is actually fairly similar to designing print in terms of significance of considered typography and visual hierarchy on all the screens.

As a long term aficionado of music I’d like to like this on playing guitar: the basics are quite easy, and its very easy to hide your mistakes on distortion (chrome) and volume, but the true craftsmanship is on the details: proper, well designed typography, careful and considered editorial process on the content and of course, the over arching thematic and composition of the whole piece. It’s fun to jam sometimes, but it’s always the classics that live on. The former Windows Phone creative director Mike Kruzeniski (@mkruz) argued a while back how the print is actually the future of interaction, and I have to agree. Every detail that matters in solid print design does so even more on a pane of glass nearing 300ppi. How details feel on it is like print on steroids. For brands and designers, this means Windows 8 is a blank canvas waiting to be painted with beautiful and meaningful pieces, using the building blocks the platform provides wisely.

With our new Finnair app, I think we’ve succeeded quite well. A big thanks goes to our client Anssi Partanen at Finnair — it’s always great to work with a client who engages with the design team 110%. Our team consisted of Akseli Anttila, Ilkka Haavisto and myself, and naturally huge credit of this goes to Futurice developers Erkka Peltoniemi and Juha Ristolainen for building the software in scope, and on time.

Towards and exciting future

The version 1.0 going live now is obviously just a start. Future uses of the app include more comprehensive service experience on managing flights, browsing destinations and bringing the Finnair quality experience to every windows 8 desktop as well. Watch this space for more developments on Finnair and mobile platforms.

• Download the app from the Windows Marketplace
• View the Finnair page on it
• Our portfolio case study

In addition to cranking out Windows 8 applications all the time here at home, we had the luxury to attend an official Windows 8 Train The Trainer event at Microsoft’s premises in Redmond, USA. We are the first and only ones from Finland who’ve had this privilege.

This multi-day event was hosted by multitude of Microsoft’s Windows 8 platform, technology and user experience evangelists, and went through every detail of Windows 8 Store Applications and platform requirements. It was great to see how seemingly no design decision had come out of thin air, but that there was extensive research behind each feature in the platform and its design framework.

Something that every designer feels when learning the Windows 8 design guidelines is that they are very strict, and can initially feel limiting. The strictness was iterated by in the training as well. There certainly are things that you really must do right to get into the Store in the first place. There are large, non-breakable, must-do features that often come as surprises to clients.

However, now that we know the design in and out, we also know where the rules are allowed to be creatively bent, given certain criteria. This allows for wonderful results, which might seem impossible without proper knowledge. Some of this is currently not understandable from the online documentation. Based on the group’s feedback, they are tweaking their documentation to bring up some things more clearly.

The enthusiasm was high, and the organisers claimed that this was the most active group ever. Quite varied group it was, we were from all over the world. Just in adjacent tables were people from Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Germany, China, and of course people all over the USA.

What was fun was that quite a few people already knew about Nordkapp. For example, they were familiar with our Windows Phone 7 Cheat Sheet. It’s fun to hear that our sharing-is-caring effort has had some meaning. So it’s a good idea to do more of that, and we will

We are not allowed to post photos from the event online, but you can have a look at Seattle / Redmond in Teppo’s Flickr set. Quiet Redmond was quite different than the big-time Seattle.

We Can Teach You Windows 8

Talking about sharing, we are now officially allowed to train others to design Windows 8 applications. We’ll soon start talking about Windows 8 in various industry, business and education events. Within few weeks you can start booking us to come train your personnel, too. You can contact us already for this.

Possibility of a Decade

Estimates now are that 400 million Windows 8 devices can be sold next year. This really is the “single biggest platform opportunity available to developers.” It is important to be in the Store in the launch, or soon after, as that’s your chance to grab huge user numbers for your app. But if you have a bad app at launch, you will never recover.

Having a good application that plays perfectly with the operating system and, and very importantly, other apps, ensures a good user experience, lot’s of screen time and happy users for your app.

We are very experienced in all platforms, yet Windows 8 is totally new and modern addition to the palette. It’s refreshing to design for. And it could be huge.

Until next time.

Startups

In addition to few new big clients that have projects about to start very soon, we’ve been helping out a bunch of startups.

These startups are building services and hardware in various fields, including medical / healthcare, fashion and document management. The projects with startups can be quite hectic, as they’re often working on an even faster timeframe than large corporations nowadays. Their reason for contacting us is often that previous design attempts have not produced quality results, or that they’re about to present their service publicly and need the next level of finesse in their service.

They’re under pressure and they need to get their stuff together, now. That’s where we come in.

With our expertise we are able to jump quickly into their mindset and collaborate on their service ideas and user interfaces really fast. Startups seem like good clients too, as they don’t fight the professional opinion. They have signed up for long hours anyway, so nobody’s (too) worried about increased workload our redesign might bring them.

A magical moment was just this week, when a startup’s developer said: “Go crazy with the interface. Don’t hold anything back. I’m really fast coder and I can do whatever. I’m bored with the standard stuff, let’s make this cool.” Now that’s the kind of attitude I’m always expecting from developers, but I rarely see. Too often you hear “Well, this will be difficult and hard, let’s see if it fits our Agile prioritisation at all”. And then it doesn’t. This can lead lead to subpar implementation. This is especially risky for startups that are fighting on a global marketplace, in which there’s always someone else who doesn’t complain, but walks the walk.

What’s also great about startup projects, is the general happiness and gratitude the clients express after an intensive project. The injection of professional design is perhaps assimilated faster and more wholeheartedly in a startup scenario where it affects the potential lifetime of the whole company in a very straightforward manner. Therefore they are rewarding projects for us too — our work has immediate and large effect. So thank you for these projects, and keep them coming.

iPad First

We’ve made an interesting observation recently in many of our projects. It is very common for the client to say: “Let’s design this first for the desktop web, but let’s keep the iPad in mind“. What does that mean? It could mean anything from not relying on mouse over effects on a web page, to responsive design, to designing a fully touch optimized web application. But it never means an app.

Sometimes we’d like too see something this: “Let’s design this touch/tablet/iPad/Windows 8 first, and keep the website in mind“.

This is in fact what is happening in more and more internationally. A very recently launched site iPad First is beginning to list things that were first done for the iPad, and often not done for web at all.

When you tie this idea together with news from the Taiwan market that Tablets outsell notebooks in May-June, you start to arrive in a conclusion that very soon tablet/touch design really has to be the first consideration. One would think that even a slightly forward leaning startup would take a tablet-first position.

Then there’s the chance that Microsoft has with its Windows 8. Even though mobile computing has surpassed the sales of desktop PC’s, there was 336 Million Windows PC’s sold last year. This year, most of those will have pre-installed Windows 8 ni them. Many will also upgrade from earlier versions to 8. Not to mention upcoming tablet devices with Windows 8. Who knows yet how many millions they will sell?

This upcoming huge user base will need Windows 8 applications. There are tons of companies involved in the Windows ecosystem and they will want to update their software. One could say that they should think Windows 8 first. And many are, that’s why I currently see something related to Windows 8 on nearly everybody’s screen here at Nordkapp.

Launching Ruutu.fi

Oh, as a rare occasion a site we designed was launched publicly, and we can mention it. This is the Ruutu.fi website, which is the online/catchup TV site for one of the main commercial TV channels in Finland, Nelonen.

We congratulate Sauli & Jukka as the main honchos on this project. Must be nice to see something public for a while (they’ve been involved with secret stuff for too long). This is just one instance or outcome of a longer collaboration in which Panu, Akseli and Sami have also played a big role. We thank the client for the project and for the permission mention it too. Also: Keep up the good work, team.

That’s it for now. Next week I’m travelling to do something interesting next week, which we’ll tell you about later. Let’s see when there is time for the next weeknote. Until then.

We’ve been into Windows 8. Just recently we’ve done two application concepts and one actual application for Windows 8. The application was called “the best one we’ve seen” in Microsoft design review. That’s nice. Who did the other apps?

Anyhow, more and more businesses are moving into Windows 8. Naturally, it’s “Metro UI” — sorry “Modern UI Style” — design language is so different to the old desktop Windows UI, that every app needs to be completely redesigned. This means a lot of work for designers, and there’s all the time new requests for us to design & redesign apps for Windows 8.

Yes, Windows 8 still has the oldskool desktop UI in the background, but even that is downscaled in visual aesthetics. We think that the old desktop UI will soon become irrelevant and/or undesirable with the Windows user base as soon as people get the feel of Modern UI Apps and start to expect all apps to work in the new UI framework.

Imagine if your app is soon the only one that forces your user to jump from the attractive, minimal, touch friendly Modern UI back to the looks-like-it’s-windows95 UI. If your competition has already made the leap to the new UI, your app will look like a loser in comparison.

There’s also a new breed of Windows machines coming out. These machines use a Windows version called Windows RT. They’re based on Arm processors, instead of Intel/AMD ones, and will not run the desktop UI or old desktop apps at all. These devices will be smaller, lighter, cheaper and will probably have a better battery life too. We imagine these cheap, more tablet oriented devices to be deployed in the millions to all sorts of on-site & outdoor & mobile uses. These use cases will all need apps done for the new Modern UI, as that’s the only one that will work.

IT managers sure don’t seem to like the new UI, but it’s is more and more a consumer/user driven market nowadays. Something’s gotta give.

Remember that often the server backend of your service doesn’t need to be changed, only the fronted. And developing Modern UI apps can be as easy as writing HTML+CSS+Scripts, so the implementation doesn’t even need to cost a lot. It’s time to move onwards to the new thing, now.

Big Data & Offshore

We’ve also done a few big data & user management projects for global customer that’s using offshore programmers to implement them. That has of course meant a lot of odd-hours teleconferences, and some cultural differences also play a role in these projects. All has been working out good in the end though, but that has required additional effort from our team to make things work out. Thanks for the push, team!

Television Just Got Disrupted

Wow, it’s been long time coming, but now Netflix and HBO are reportedly entering Finland and other Scandinavian countries before the end of this year. These massive American players bring something that the local TV industry hasn’t been able to offer: unlimited streaming of latest movies and best TV-shows, on-demand & any time.

As a TV watcher, and as an owner of several devices in which these services will work in, I’m quite happy about this development. But this also means that some of our customers might need to rethink their service offerings in order to stay relevant next year.

In fact the Finnish TV industry has of course been looking at the situation. A recent CEO comment “we will kick Netflix in the balls”, sparked some harsh commentary in the internet. Perhaps Netflix and HBO will initially be services just for the first adopters, sure, but it also seems that along American online TV services, we are also getting American style competitor commentary by CEO’s. Bring on the entertainment!

Until next time.

Image credit
Netflix on Windows 8 at Techradar.com

It’s been a surprisingly long time since the last weeknote. Reason for this was my extremely busy end of the season workload that was immediately followed the next day by a very long paternity leave + summer holiday, which again was quite busy and away from the computer.

Well anyhow, let’s recap some things through May, June & July.

One Traveller

Our Irish junior super designer Kate left us & Helsinki to travel the world a bit more. She had much to do with our Urbanflow project for example, but she was involved in many other projects as well. We miss her, but perhaps she’ll come back to Finland and Nordkapp one day!

Two Copycats

Our website had two more copycat over summer. This time from Spain and Jaipur, India. These cases have been mostly dealt with by now. But still, look at some of those photos in the post header. Huggable dudes!

Two Blog Posts

Panu was pondering the issue of reference rights, which seems really hard to get in our business. Sometimes it is totally understandable that we can’t show something super secret that won’t be coming out for a year or more, but why we cannot even say we work with you? Panu answers the question: What’s in it for you?

Sami went to Berlin to give a talk ‘Stories, Behaviour and Purpose’ at Mashable Innovation Series / BMW Guggenheim Labs Berlin. Check out the transcript of his talk and slides to get a grasp of what is happening in cities, design and technology currently.

Three Juniors

The summer was busy with Nordkappers breeding. Sauli, Matti and Sami all had a babies during the summer and all within just two months of each other. Sauli & Matti had their first ones so they must be on the edge all the time currently and older estate man Sami had his second one.

Umpteenth award

Urbanflow ruled this time in the Core77 2012 Design Awards SPECULATIVE Category.

We basically only lost to an effort by Toyota, so we had a good run.

What makes us super happy was the comment on the judgement video (at 9:26) from jury captain Bruce Sterling: “Urbanflow Helsinki is one of the finest works of design fiction that I’ve ever seen”.

Until next time, internet.

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Hello my name is Sami and I’m here to talk about how to make our surroundings better with design and technology.

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To complete image credits and links, please see the embeddable presentations below:

• The deck on Slideshare
• The deck on Speakerdeck

Links and Image credits
Main photo: zeigor on instagram
New bikepath Baana in Helsinki
Chapel vs kebab
Countryside photo: Jussi Pasanen / @jopas
Urbanflow Helsinki
Pace layers image from Howard Silverman, People & Places 2009:
Alvar Aalto’s work from artek.fi,alvaraalto.fi/ and Wikipedia.
Xylobands Facebook
Shadow Cities: Teppo Kotirinta / Nordkapp
Strava.com
Google Project Glass
If this then that: http://ifttt.com
Belkin WEMO
Brickstarter by Sitra SDL
Helsinki Transport Travel Time Map
Nike Fuel
Tesco QR Code subway ad: http://www.littledoremi.com/
William Gibson on the art of fiction at the Paris Review

Ravintolapäivä / Restaurant Day
Helsinki City Public Transport Visualised
Candy Chang; it’s Good to be here
Steve Jobs quoted on Stevetold.us