Weeknote #669: Put your right foot forward
Have you ever bought a pair of sneakers online?
I have — several times, actually. For now, my winning strategy has been only acquiring familiar models from the same brands over and over again. Not very adventurous of me but after getting burnt a couple of times when going for something new and not checking whether returning the items is free, almost free, or too way expensive.
There are apps that help you select the correct size of a pair you have never tried, but they do not provide a success rate of 100%. What I do is I keep a list of sizes of different sneakers I have bought but even then the material changes and variance in production quality has made me fail. The latest one was returning a pair of Nike Huarache that was exactly of the same size as four pairs I had worn earlier.
We are also conducting a little research project on buying perfectly fitting shoes online. You can help make this experience better in the future by answering this brief survey.
Return to form
It starts to look looks like part of our crew would be slowly returning to the office as rumours about booked meeting rooms have started circulating in our Slack.
In our Thursday morning academy, Shakti and Kenneth threw a presentation about the future of one particular industrial client of ours, and it sure looks great.
What else happened this week?
Teppo needs a device with LiDAR sensor. Because you know why.
Sari has been working on new concepts and enjoying the spring evenings.
Matti has been in sales mode. Lots of new things at the table!
Shakti has been conducting customer interviews with Liam to gain deeper insights, before starting to design a new augmented-reality/camera-vision application for a new client. We’ll share more about this project in the coming months, stay tuned.
Liam’s wearing his anthropology hat this week in two different projects this week: In one he’s making sense of people’s purchasing and fit preferences when shopping online, and in another, he’s trying to understand people’s states of mind and goals when using a digital service.
Topias has been enjoying the hassle-free remote workdays now when the kids are at school and daycare.
Linda and Eero are wrapping up a design system project. They are also continuing with new features of new service for another client.
Virpi is deep diving into big co-creation session about future opportunities. Fingers crossed that the internet works and everyone has access to all the tools.
This week has been an awesome reminder of the power of virtual communities for Sami, as he did two talks in two countries from the comfort of an empty Nordkapp office. Both talks, UX Tartu, and IxDA London: Designing for an Uncertain Future were thrilling and apparent successes. He quite enjoys dissecting his thinking with other likeminded people, both IRL and virtually.
Five things we read this week
- Making the everyday extraordinary from Red Dot — We want to congratulate Fiskars design team becoming the Red Dot: Design team of the year. And rightfully so, as Fiskars have been releasing perfectly designed products with well thought out details from year to year.
- Elevating customer experience excellence in the next normal from McKinsey — Quality report on emerging trends in customer behaviour in the world after Covid-19 pandemic.
- How Japan’s Tokio Marine uses AI to process insurance claims in ‘minutes’ from Techwire Asia(if well-known) — Another interesting application for AI that cleverly boosts efficiency and makes processing insurance claims way faster than ever before.
- CX Report 2020 from John Maeda— Lots of reports have been coming out in the last couple of weeks and this is one of the interesting ones.
- Studio Ghibli backgrounds from Studio Ghibli — This is not of very high importance but everyone needs nice Zoom backgrounds and here are a few beautiful ones from the beloved animation studio.
Weeknotes are what happened at our studio this week. This week’s weeknote was curated by Eero Pailinna.
Eero is a designer of services, interactions and user experience at Nordkapp, who is currently thinking of the possibilities of Apple Glasses — and of the possibility of them becoming vaporware.
