Launch!

The service has been in the making for quite a long now. It’s good to finally see it go online and start to pickup users. In fact, due to the unique nature of this service it has a potential to grab huge number of users from the general populace. This project has seen many people since it’s beginning, but mainly the final design is done by Sami and myself. Talented people from the client and a 3rd party agile tech house have also had months long endurance, fighting all sorts of technical challenges, and working a lot with us on the design, too. Sadly we can’t say which service this is.Thanks from our behalf as well, it’s been a long ride.

And it’s not over yet. Now we are planning the next half a year’s worth of development on this one and other sibling services in this service ecosystem.

Concept!

In the multitouch tablet TV concept for our dear client SuomiTV, Mikael the client and some of our people talk about the place of tablets at home, our research on the topic and some new fantastic interactions we came up with. Panu, Sami, Ilkka, Sauli, Tia and Samuel were the main team in this project, but the final concepts include ideas from probably all of us.

The video comes (so far) with two blog posts that further iterate the concept. Have a look at them if you’re interested in multitouch interactions.

PART 1: TAP THE TV – The Concept

PART 2: TAP THE TV — New Interactions

In the end this is all about how watching television is changing. And naturally anything that is (or could be) in the middle of change, is something that we at Nordkapp are interested in. Nice, quick, fun, inspiring project. Let’s have more of these.

See you in one or two summer weeks. Maybe.

People are still excited about the iPad project. You can see one of the many project group sessions going on in the above picture. The project is coming together and a cool video concept looms in the future.

Design-wise iPad also brings challenges, as there’s so many ways interaction could be done on it. One could select a more traditional route or go completely crazy with it. The perfect solution is probably often somewhere in between. It’s inspiring to see so much effort from the tech and design communities being put into developing platforms and best practices for these devices. This sort of innovation was probably happening when computers were being invented, and has always been going on, but nowadays it seems to be happening at shorter and shorter time intervals. Sharing is a great thing.

In fact, the iPad and the communities around it remind me of the often quoted words here at Nordkapp:

The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.
—William Gibson

Whatever we design can implemented and used immediately by people, which is extremely refreshing for future-looking designers like us.

In The Feed

If you haven’t noticed yet, our blog also features a section called “In The Feed“, which includes a flow of interesting items from the internets our people have deemed noteworthy enough to be added to Tumblr. In The Feed is present in the blog homepage and also now on its own URL.

This section will give you a good and near constant flow of hot topics in Interaction Design, Data Visualization, Cities, Design, AR, Management, UI innovations and what not. Anything even distantly related to the interesting world of digital communication and interaction. Check it out if you want to be entertained or inspired.

Weeknote break coming up?

I’m thinking I need a summer break from writing weeknotes soon. I’m currently extra busy on my freetime and work hours are pretty much minute-to-minute all client work. Therefore weeknotes are sadly getting a bit long in the tooth. (As you can see from the title, I’ve already taken a shortcut of grouping two weeks in to one weeknote.)

Besides, the Finnish summer is finally starting. During summer companies and projects go in to slow-mode. This slowing down normally starts after Mid Summer, which is next week’s weekend. You know, Mid Summer is a huge thing in Finland as we’ve suffered a long winter before that. Often that’s when peoples’ holidays also start. Some of Nordkappers escape to the nature then, too. There might not be too much to write about and I might want to be on a beach.

In effect, don’t expect too much from the weeknotes from the weeks to come. But I might stick around for some more weeks, before chillin’ over summer. Let’s see.

Take it easy in the meantime, dudes and dudettes.

Media house project’s first phase will be ready this Friday. During next few days we’ll finalize our presentation materials and specification document while design team finalizes the look & feel.

The client is very interested in deepening cooperation with us. This development looks very promising going forward. It seems that Nordkapp’s honest, open and user centered approach on concept and service design is much needed “breath of fresh air” for big organizations as well. Making development based only on technical decisions or hand-waving just won’t do it anymore.

Elsewhere, the service ecosystem thing is nearing its first launches. The IxD+GFX team pulled together some interesting UX-solutions; ideas that only happens through open, laid-back work processes; basically through sketches on the wall in the project rooms and random co-working sessions next to a display. Furthermore; the challenge of production tracking regarding exact uniform pixel outcome, is once again ahead. Times many.

On the TV front, our brief is “online strategy for a television channel” but it should be “strategy for television channel” – Matti thinks our big challenge is to make stakeholders understand that there is no online versus offline. Anyway, this week we’ll basically write our own brief and after that start workshopping and evolve things further with the client. Interesting stuff!

Agile moves quickly: after last week’s rant on Agile the situation in some on-going projects has improved significantly. Coders seem willing to evolve the Agile process, too! This same insight is also being put into use in projects starting during summer and fall. Agile is looking good again.

First iPad UI case is also coming up. We’ve been fooling around with an iPad for quite long now, and we are all impressed by the potentials of this new groundbreaking platform. Fabian gave a small presentation to the customer about readability and navigation on the iPad together with Sauli. Fabian’s personal conclusion: “goodbye dear old print media”. Pretty much everybody have been given a chance to participate in iPad ideation and now the process continues in a smaller team, where all extra is being ripped away and design is being concentrated on most important features and their usability.

Quickies

• » If in doubt, ask users. If client is in doubt, tell what users said.
• » Forcing yourself  to think how to explain the basics of your craft opens your mind up for different angles. This is the very reason Sami likes lecturing as a “side hobby”.
• » Apple announced iPhone 4. Some people are now counting weeks/months towards the end of their iPhone 3GS subscriptions — when can they upgrade?
• » We helped our old colleague Ville with his tippingeurope.com and villevesterinen.com sites. He seems happy about that.

Until next week, peeps.

Last week, like any other week, we worked quite a lot on projects done in Agile. Nowadays there always seems to be a few of these going on, and new ones being planned.

Our relationship with agile is interesting, as we are neither big or small agile house ourselves. We are an Interactive Design consultancy which means that we get to work with both big and small companies, experienced and not-so-experienced product owners and see different scrum management software used by coders who all seem to see sprint & iteration work a bit differently from each other.

The amount of design we do in and for Agile Scrum projects is therefore quite high and we see several interpretations of “how it should be done”. Being in this position gives us quite a good understanding of the potential problems that can happen in a project when certain criteria is met.

Some of this know-how was already shared a little while ago by our Sami in the UX Lx conference. Several important points are described in his presentation. One main idea is that design tasks should be known 2 sprints ahead. This gives enough time for necessary design tasks: user research, design iterations, prototyping etc., and makes sure that when coding starts in 1-2 sprints, the basics design problems are already solved and everybody knows what needs to be done.

Typically this pre-planning works initially very well for sprints 0-2 maybe, but then starts to fall apart when the original task order is changed in the Scrum. Suddenly it seems more difficult to see 2 sprints ahead. Also the sprint starting right now might end up having different tasks than originally planned 2 sprints ago. This is what forces the design into playing catch-up with the coding.

How all of this can be solved is will be our task for the rest of the year. I think we need to add to Sami’s manifesto and create a Nordkapp Agile Manifesto which includes clear action points for all stakeholders and what they need to do and when for an agile project to succeed.

Work

Sami will be lecturing in Aalto University Business School next week about User Experience Design. Program includes paper prototyping, layouts and sketching and what not. See more here.

Generally people are super excited about new iPhone & iPad projects they are working on. Foamcores are filled with hand drawn and computerized UI drafts and there seems to be workshops related to these every week. What’s extra fun to see is that our newer people are heavily involved in these as well. Apparently they’re also feeling happy about this kind of work.

Until next week, people.

Photo cred: Defensive Scrum (Rugby term) by P D

This Saturday we held a workshop as a part of the ideation for the forthcoming World Design Capital Helsinki 2012. The theme was “Touchscapes: Toward the next urban ecology” as coined by our friend Adam Greenfield. He also gave a talk about Taking Networks Seriously and Petri Kola from Aalto Medialab talked about open data in Finland, and also about “method Mastomäki” developed on using data for your own benefit.

A few clear main themes rose up from the discussion and concepts: Personal interaction and play in urban environment, way-showing and enabling communities through urban media. Personally I was attending some other business, but I’m told is was a very nice and rich afternoon indeed.

The ideas will be at WDC Helsinki website, and all material will be made public during the following days. The first batch of photos are out on Sami’s Flickr already.

Boing Boing’d

This is a tough one. Our intention to soften and transform an industry is going as planned, but it ain’t easy to teach an old dog new tricks. The outside reactions have been strong, and as expected most people use the topic to vent their frustrations from the last 10-15 years. A good thing is a few people seem to get the point, too. Sami’s a bit worried about the speed of progress here— due the amount of stakeholders the decision making is slow, even to the point where the original pitch will be 2 years old next month.

But in any case the ball is rolling now and we’ve done all we can. Our partners in crime, Henrik W & Kennel Helsinki, have done a stellar job here, and the result is first piece of work we’ve done that got Boing Boing’d. Looking forward to some more media attention in the following weeks, and the final get-go for the second, very different part of the story.

Other news

During the week we found out some idea we had some time ago are on their way to being patented worldwide. It always feels nice, even though we think in general patents are a bit evil.

And one more UX LX thing: Panu’s UX LX Twitter engine and talk made it to Johnnyholland.org’s UX LX wrapup. Go check it out to see what was the UX LX conference all about, and to read main points of Panu’s presentation. His ideas resonate so well with designer’s reality that perhaps everyone should learn them by heart.

That’s it for now, until next week it is.

50% of Nordkapp were in the UX Lx conference in Lisbon, Portugal. Bruno and his friends really outdid themselves with this very well organized, world class conference with big name speakers, room trashing workshops and lots of afterski events. Thank you organizers and fellow conference goers! UX Lx is definitely now on the map as a major conference.

However, there is simply no time to write a longer weeknote about it, as we came back in the early hours of Monday morning, barely dodging the ash cloud’s second coming. After that it’s been quite a busy week so far, as at least I’ve been re-immersing myself with the family and work again. And it’s already late Tuesday. Need sleep, will upload photos soon (one day) and share notes with fellow Nordkappers.

BTW: Sami’s and Panu’s presentations in UX Lx went well. Especially fun was Panu’s “by magic of technology” system that tweeted his slides to Twitter with the #uxlx hashtag, while he was still speaking! That generated quite a lot of interest. Sami’s ideas also generated discussion about agile and designing for it. His crowd seemed to be half designers, half developers.

One more thing: You should get ready for next Saturday’s WDC 2012 Idea forum: Touchscapes at our office. Lot’s of ideation and dreaming up the future.

This week we were mostly hard at work with current projects. Several things in finishing phases. Nothing too new there.

Meeting and team room name competition winner was selected. Matti won and the names will be Valhalla, Asgard, Ragnarok, Odin and Thor. Quite Norwegian. Congrats to him! I’m not bitter even though I became second and third. Special thanks to people in Twitter who gave me good ideas for the names. We didn’t win, sorry.

About half of the company is finally heading to the UX Lx conference in Lisbon, Portugal. The damn ash cloud from Iceland has just made a comeback and how we get to Portugal on Tuesday morning is still uncertain. Currently the airspace seems quite clear over Germany but who knows what the cloud will do. Anyway if conference goers actually get there Twitter will probably be quite busy with #UXLX tagged tweets this week. In fact, it already is.

An important announcement: we are organizing a workshop as part of the World Design Capital Helsinki 2012 Ideas Forum -day. The workshop deals with our recent favorite subject: Urban screens and information design for urban context. Read Sami’s more thorough blog post about the topic.

That’s it for now. See you in Portugal!

This week’s weeknote will a be a bit shorter, because noteworthy things this week consisted mostly of presentations, events and blog posts. Or maybe because the weekend was dominated by Vappu, the Finnish Mayday, a country wide celebration of workers.

This week Panu released two blog posts: UX leadership insight #15: You and the series ending UX leadership insight: wrap-up. Be sure to read and understand them, you’ll become a better design lead and designer in the process. Panu will soon also be iterating around the same concepts in the UX Lx conference in Portugal. If you are going, come meet him and rest of the Nordkapp UX Lx team there.

On Tuesday Sami gave a talk about Agile to a group of Product Owners at our client’s. He’s also going to talk more about that topic in the same UX Lx conference.

Sami tested the waters with the Finnish version of his UX Lx presentation about combining agile methodology with interaction design by giving a talk to our client’s product owners. Went down really well, and the English premiere of the same thing will be in week and a half in Lisbon.

On Wednesday Matti, Sami & me attended Kick Off event of Luovimo, a Finnish project that aims to help creative companies go international. The keynote speaker was inspiring mr. Roger Mavity who gave a funny talk about pitching. Other companies included in the program include ACE-Production, Aivan, Backstage Music Factory, Blue Media, Casual Continent, Citynomadi, GigsWiz.com, Idean Enterprices, Matila Röhr Nordisk, Miltton, Nordic Drama Corner, PES-Arkkitehdit, Produs, S.E.O.S Design, Songhi Entertainment, Stereoscape, Tarinatalo, Toothpick and Undo. We look forward to working with them. The event was described as “Luovimo picks out creative elite” in the Finnish advertising media M&M. While that sounds a bit posh it’s funny because it’s true.

On Thursday Sami & me gave a talk about information design in the design school in Lahti. The audience was half students, half professionals. The school churns out the best graphic designers in Finland on a regular basis, who apparently originally commented on our presentations that the topics “sounded scary”, but they also considered them visually cool and interesting. Sami talked about data, context and information design while I talked about urban screens and how research is transformed into interactive design. Hopefully our talks gave them inspiration to go interactive and gave them trust in their skills. Basic concepts of visual design are very similar in print and digital after all. We also learned good points about information design and data visualization from Helsingin Sanomat, the biggest news paper in Finland. A nice and varied seminar in total.

On Friday we had our internal demo day. We heard in depth presentations of design processes behind few recent big projects Nordkappers have been doing. Special mention go to Panu & Matti, who have been doing long lasting and good work on the project Oslo. Aki presented an design evolution timeline of a old, large web service that coincidentally I have been working on as well sometime around 2000. Its latest incarnation is now fully designed in Nordkapp and will become public sometime in the future. Sami & me also recapped our Lahti presentations for others. After the demo day people escaped to the city for their Vappu celebrations.

Old space

By the way, Ii you are interested what happened to our previous office you can read all about in the Helsinki Design Lab weeknotes. Helsinki Design Lab is an initiative by Sitra, The Finnish Innovation Fund, to “advance strategic design as a new discipline in tackling the problems of the interdependent world”. We are happy to give them a venue for their work.

That’s it for now. Until next week!

Last week Ville V. from Arcticstartup.com asked me “what kinds of benefits, if any, you have had after you started the habit [of weeknotes]. ” Here’s some sort of an answer that I skipped giving him earlier, starting from the very beginning.

Background

This all started with us having our weekly company meetings, where we discussed what everybody was doing and if there was any major problems with them. It worked really well for a year or two, but recently there was a growing feeling with everybody that it just wasn’t working anymore. Maybe it was because we got more people now, and the meeting started to take longer and longer. It was fun to know what others were doing but for example the decisions to help others in their projects were done over the week, not really just in the week meeting. So on an individual level it wasn’t quite useful anymore. Instead many were trying to hold themselves back from rushing to their computers and post-its to start working already, no matter what time the meeting was held.

One of our core values as a company is transparency, but apart from actively sharing on Twitter, we felt we weren’t really communicating this. The concept of weeknotes made a perfect sense to both of these challenges: the notes would work as information sharing within the company and also create transparency by telling other people what it is that we actually do. Especially the later point was interesting, as our projects are very restricted with what to communicate outside, and thus often cannot simply present what we do. Weeknotes provide a nice way of telling about our work, while making sure we don’t disclose any confidential project details.

To clarify a bit and spill a secret: there’s a more precise version of weeknotes we use internally. New or interesting stuff is dug from there. Any recurring patterns in peoples reports are also written about here in the public.

Readers and outcomes

From what we hear, our weeknotes seem to be read by various people, include of course our employees but also clients, friends, large companies and even our competition. Apparently our weeknotes are making positive waves in some random (as in not associated with us in a client relationship) big companies in the lines of “This is great! How do they do this? We don’t even have a blog! How could we do something like this?”. Maybe weeknotes as a concept will bring more transparency to some big companies in the long run, too?

Also some of our clients read these. Maybe they find it fun to try to find their project from the mysterious descriptions of things? When we meet them in real life they quite often comment on things they could only know from the weeknotes. And I think it’s fun. They get to know Nordkapp as a bunch of humans with human issues, instead of just hired robots. In general, weeknotes don’t seem to be hurting our relationship with our clients, on the contrary: we are getting bigger and bigger single-supplier deals all the time. And this we appreciate this very much.

What comes to our competition, we hope they get some good ideas from the weeknotes and our blog in general. We are probably dealing with very similar issues anyway and sharing is the best way to take the design profession forward.

Internally, I believe, weeknotes make people more proud of what they do. It easy to get lost in the daily work without realizing that the thing you do is often actually really meaningful to potentially thousands of employees, not to mention our client’s customers, which could be in the millions. Weeknotes help us understand that we are working in a world class design agency here, and not feeling too small and sad like a Finnish tradition would have as do. A proud designer leads to better design leads to better service leads to more satisfied customer.

All and all, everything about the weeknotes is positive. We recommend the concept to any company of any size.

Now, let’s get back to the actual weeknote.

This week

This week we all were mostly just amazed about our new office. There’s always a certain mental boost with every move, but this time it also means that finally we have enough space to simultaneously run multiple workshops and yet maintain a peaceful working environment elsewhere. Our main meeting room equals the size of a Finnish two room apartment. All of this made everybody happy and it’s been really nice to see spontaneous team work happen in our new team rooms, kitchen or lobby.

We sponsored BarCampHelsinkiV at YLE this week.

In other news, Aki and Sami finished a project with Petteri H., to a client called Rossum. The application deals with industrial task management, and client is extremely happy on what we’ve done. A case study to follow at some point. In this project the iPad proved to be an excellent demonstration tool by the way.

Fabian came up with some new ideas together with Sami regarding our visual design methodology. This cooperation could provide to be a excellent asset in the future. Internal workshops are coming. This was also his first full week at NK and he says the massive know-how of such a small group of individuals is a great personal opportunity to learn and grow for him. That’s great to hear and we are surely going to learn from him too! In fact, Sami says it’s really good feeling to work with someone coming from a different, but very competent point of view. It challenges you, and forces you to grow professionally.

Petri worked on the TV and banking projects and gave a lecture about Design Management in Helsinki Institute of Marketing and another one about Service Design in Joutsa.

Samuel’s new big task is getting into design tasks related to a web service with the largest amount of public data available in Finland. I’d call this a good and challenging task for an intern.

Panu’s been doing many things: 2 projects in hand off phase and one in concept. He re-discovered some of the not-so-new topics of persuasion, conversions, funnels, metrics etc. According to him tt’s good to get back to the basics every now and then. He also blogged about Tacit Knowledge.

Matti’s been having face-to-face sessions with our people, digging out peoples’ hopes and dreams. More of that to come. He’s also quite busy with project work and happy to see the office build up. He wants to thank Ilkka personally because our business looks so good. We join him in these thanks.

I’ve been doing IxD for two projects that go hand in hand, and also been learning Objective-C with Sauli. It’s good to keep learning new stuff, even if it seems overly complicated at first. Sauli’s also been doing quality assurance on older projects with Peetri and doing “stuff they do in real jobs” AKA building and carrying furniture.

Me and Sami should also sync our presentations for next week’s Information Design 2010 Seminar in Lahti.

OK, that’s long enough. EOF and cheers.

As said before, we are between offices. Our old office has some new use to it already, but the new one is still getting its finishing touches by the renovation crew. Well, actually we are waiting for the floor to dry and get its hardened properties. In effect, we had nowhere to go.

Surprisingly, this was not a big problem. People just had to choose whether they wanted to work from home, cafe or wherever (of course depending on the level of secrecy required by the project at hand). Because this also coincided with the arrival of company iPads, several emails this week contained greetings from “this and that restaurant” and included the signature “Sent from my iPad”.

Other than that, for the info on what happened this week, I have to trust our digital systems and people’s own explanations of what has been going on. This is because I’ve just been working from home, been on a holiday in Estonia, had a flue, and haven’t really spoken to any colleague face-to-face this week. People, have your say:

Matti

Last week we managed to push OSLO forward huge steps – on Tue we presented concept alternatives to the client, and workshopped an implementable concept approach, which the client approved. Rest of the week we pushed this selected concept forward. Next week we’ll finally got approval for the project’s 1st phase and hopefully get a full reference right from the client as well!

Apart from that, I’ve also talked about new resources with Ilkka and planned how things would work if we would have one more COO kind of a guy involved.

Oh and one more thing, the iPad, which is way too cool! Some days I mostly worked with it, and it worked pretty well. Only keynote is still missing.

Aki

Finalizing a prototype of a mobile UI project, verifying client’s wireframes and mostly excited about iPad, iPad, iPad.

Sauli

I built a video site. Wasted lots of time on rendering the videos. It’s hard to find good balance between quality and reasonable file size. I think in maybe 5-10 years we don’t have worry about this kind of things.

What if a some browser vendor would get so much money and resources that they could build the ultimate browser. What new features it would have?

Did Teppo’s creativity exercises.

Samuel

Handed video site’s layout to Fabian and started on a web brand guidelines for a company. Excited about the move to the new office and a Trip to Tarto, Estonia.

Fabian

Thrown into full steam agile project with Teppo and Panu’s leftovers.

Panu

Projects never finish, they just move to maintenance phase. This week we designed a couple of small design additions and improvements to make a old project even better.

All systems go in a new project! Implementation project starts right now. Teppo and Daniel will take over and correct all the design flaws that I created in the concept phase. (editor: the design’s fine)

The media house project will this week create the first UI concepts. We’ll get these reviewed by Tuesday. This is the messy part of the project, where we communicate actively with the client so that our and their expectations will meet.

In the near future, we will be starting to design a mobile version of a web service that we designed. It will be fun to put some mobile experience in good use again.

This week, I’ve been mostly getting excited about exploring alternative working locations.

Petri

I’ve been creating and updating two lecturing sessions: First one will be about Design Management or Design Thinking. Second one is about Service Design and how small business units can utilize design efficiently in general.

This week’s most exciting meeting was with colleagues from ‘southern Helsinki’ —Tallinn. Looking forward to give them return visit in few months as promised.

Definitely all the eyes were focused on Iceland due to dramatic events. Because of these ash clouds, our sister company Lillehammer seems to be stuck at Milan and few other friends have had to change their flight schedules into ferry-car schedules. Maybe this is the mother nature’s tactic of turning business into trendy slow-living mode. Yet it remains to be seen how this event will affect weather and food production conditions in long term.

Sami

Made a pitch for a large software company. Worked on Nordkapp.fi 4.0, synthesizing Sauli’s IA to design drivers and principles. Working on NK products & services v2.0, and also updating other corporate assets for the future. Some work on roles and job descriptions too as well as with finalizing the values & culture.

Lots of work on concept and graphics from the future in one project. Taking load of Panu & Teppo.

Elsewhere, first of a group of services is now ready for private beta. Visual style needs some tweaks still but can be implemented to other projects too. Which is where I am helping Fabian with this week.

Lots of pieces falling together which is nice.

Oh and got an iPad, eBay’d some gift cards for the US iTunes. Result: iPad now loaded with iWork, concept magazines and alike. Device is cool, but apps seem to range from very cool to utter crap. Like mentioned earlier on Twitter, some of the designs remind me very clearly of first days of Flash 10 years ago. it’s about the context people, not doing stuff just because you can.

Teppo

Among other things already mentioned, I urged our people to do “creativity enhancing things” from one of those lists while they were away from the office this week. I was thinking about listing what people did here, but the submitted list became just way too long. Basically I would have ended up reposting nearly the full list here! Instead, I urge you try them at your work / life!

That’s it for this weird week. Happy creativeness for the upcoming week and hopefully we get to our new office soon. Cheers.