Weeknote 459–460
This week: learning from each other, talking things and getting competitive in cycling, bots and dogfooding, what we read.
The art of constant development
Every project is an opportunity to learn, and we’re constantly trying to be better. At our current size there is so much silent knowledge and wide experience on various skills that should not go astray. To solve this, we kind of formalized the thing and started biweekly team breakfast sessions combined with 2–3 hours of sharing and learning new skills and improving old ones together as a team.
We call this thing Nordkapp Academy, a forum to learn from each other, share thoughts and improve on our way of working. So far we have had sessions on rapid ideation, customer journeys and service blueprints, covered the future of the internet and have also gotten more concrete on stuff like company financial transparency 101. We are planning to open these sessions for the wider audience in the autumn when we get our shiny new office. Stay tuned for more.
Gamifying the commute for good
Spring kicked in and all mighty bikers from the Nordkapp have taken their precious bikes out. Matti, our head of cycling and commute, signed our team into the Kilometrikisa, a friendly contest for companies and organisations aiming to develop cycling culture in Finland and to do good for charity. The playful competition started on 1st of May and runs through the summer until September.
Since we seem to be quite competitive by our nature, the contest really got people into biking. During the first week there was for example a 20 km route to work through Espoo, a 40 km chill out evening ride around Helsinki, and not to mention riding the 111 km Giro d’Espoo “just for fun” over the weekend. Quite obviously, we have a dedicated Slack bot for the contest as well, just to check who is leading — and if one should take “a bit longer” route back home from work. We’re all happy it’s sunny outside.
Eating your own dogfood: Bots
So, bots are a thing now. We’ve had our share of designing contextual dialogue assistants and whatnot in several products already, and like to think we understand enough at least to see what a minefield conversational UI can be. Two things that have risen up recently are
1 — Conversational UI changes branding and engagement quite dramatically, as the brand goes even beyond the product and becomes a dialogue. Words, sentences, narrative, a tone of voice. How could we better define this?
2 — We have had deep and engaging discussions about whether or not virtual assistants will become archetypes that will or should be treated in similar manner as regular users. What happens when you build a customer journey through the “eyes” of a service bot?
Also a lot of discussion about the dangers of getting stuck in the incremental improvement loop, instead of actually going out and searching for the right whys and challenging the status quo. Of course, at times it can be hard to look at the horizons and reach for the utopia if you have a business to maintain. But if you don’t do it, someone else will — and then your business might be gone anyway. Disruption happens. And that’s where we as designers come in, finding the right whys and helping companies and corporations shift their thinking and cultures product by product.
Shortlisted for Best Customer Experience in Blue Arrow Awards
There’s a new awards show in town, called Blue Arrow Awards. It is a new industry competition set by a consortium of 12 Finnish software and digital development companies with the goal to “select the best services, teams, people and code in digital industry in 7 categories.” The categories are a fair bit more interesting than usual — for example “Epic purchasing”.
Our long standing client Veikkaus is honored to be a finalist in three of them — Customer Experience, Best Performing Team and Epic Purchasing. If you ask me, they deserve a win in all of them, and we’re looking forward to the awards show on Thursday 26.5.
Nordkapp reads, week 459
We’ve been big fans of the double diamond design process for a long time here. Methodologies come and go, but as far as simplifications of a complex process go, it is a pretty solid tool to apply in different contexts and challenges. A few days ago Dan Nessler posted a pretty solid evolution of it where he combined IDEO’s HCD process into a revised, more detailed double diamond. We like it, and intend to borrow and build upon it in the near future.
Regarding quantum identity mentioned last week, it does really exist and is rooted in cold hard science. Schrödinger would rejoice.
We’ve looked up to IDEO since the early days of the company and carry on doing so as they are one of the few companies doing meaningful work and pushing the industry forward to new places.
Where yearly reports tend to repeat the same things all over again, this actually gets a many right. Our faves are #1, the shift from pixels towards more behavioural interaction patterns and conversation-based future,#4: designing around time and #7, the internet of people, not things.
As Mary Meeker famously stated, disruption happens wherever there is a bad user experience. The DAO is a de-centralized leaderless venture fund, created using the Bitcoin-inspired financial platform Ethereum. Instead of existing solely as legal documents, The DAO by laws are hard-coded into a blockchain. Sounds like something out of a William Gibson novel, and we approve.
Til the next week, people of the internet!
