1. Establishing thought leadership

2. Driving sales

3. Building a partner network

4. Iterating the toolkit & methodology

Still in the beginning of 2020, the term “sustainability” was just another buzzword IT-consultancies threw around. Vincit got a headstart to many other companies in Helsinki with something more tangible: We had version 1 of our new design methodology and the toolkit to go with it. We set out with the following goals for H1 of 2020:

Sustainable digitalisation offering development for a consulting company in Finland and the US.

Planet Centric Design

Planet Centric Design has stirred up considerable interest worldwide. The amount of incoming leads was unprecedented at Vincit. In 2020, sustainable digitalisation (lead by PCD) became Vincit's spearhead in strategy and branding.Among designers, Planet Centric Design created a movement. Our team was asked to present the approach in meetups and conferences around the world. Some universities started offering courses on Planet Centric Design to their design students.

Proven market differentiation

Vincit acquired several new international strategic customers through the contributions made by the PCD team.

New client partnerships

1. Stakeholder insight

2. Sales reps' insight

3. Concept creation & prototyping

4. Validation

Our work of creating the initial version of the sales tool began guided by our our own intuition. The overall design and development process was extremely lean, with just 4 people in the team contributing to the work.

Service design, UI/UX design & front-end development for a startup building a sales enablement tool.

Showell

Since it's birth in 2012, Showell has gained massive market adoption across the globe. Companies in industries such as heavy machinery, construction, high tech, and life sciences have started using Showell as their only sales tool. These days, Showell is available for iPad, Android and Windows 10.

Market adoption

2. Consumer insight

3. Benchmarks & ideation

4. Concept finalisation

As the scope of the projects was massive considering all the different verticals, we began the project with a close dialogue with Alma's staff about which vertical to focus on. Our suggestion was to pick one or two verticals, and treat them as pilot domains for the the upcoming horizontal concepts. Two verticals were picked for the pilot: housing & living, and cars & mobility.

Service design & UI/UX design for one of the biggest news medias in Finland.

Alma Themes

Since the adoption of the UI widgets in several of their services, the traffic flowing between Alma Media's verticals has increased significantly. This has resulted in a boost in advertising income for the client.

Significant increase in horizontal traffic

1. Interface inventory

2. Structural planning

3. Design system implementation

4. Asset handoff

Aina Wireless budget for revamping their design assets meant there would have to be some ruthless scoping and clear priorities for the work ahead. I had 150 hours in total to complete the project. I followed these steps to make this happen:

Design system development for a startup building physical and digital push-to-talk solutions.

Aina Wireless

In less than 1 full month of work, the first version of design system was delivered to the client. The scope of the design system was limited, but all elements needed to quickly create new views into the administrative interface were included.

Version 1 of design system

Aina Wireless cut down on the time spent in their design-development handoff by starting to use the design system. The design system provided a very streamlined designer/developer experience in combination with the React front-end.

Decreased time for design and development, better communication

Establishing a design process

The sprint pt.1 - Problem scope and initial ideas

The sprint pt.2 - High fidelity mockups, prototypes & testing

After trying our luck with the original idea, Hubchat pivoted. We had been strongly guided by the intuition of the founders, which turned out to be misguided: For users, the nature of commenting in publications served a different purpose than what they were using communities on social media for. We ditched the commenting section plugins, and focused on strictly developing our own platform.

Design team leadership for a startup creating a community platform.

Hubchat

Hubchat as a company was closed down by tax authorities due to legal troubles faced by the company majority share holder. The team was at 44 people at maximum, out of which 7 were designers. Our design process proved extremely successful, producing experiment-based results that were easy to hand off to development.

A Promising start

Prototyping for impact

Picking the right design drivers

Re-organizing the navigation

Typographic battles

We kicked off the project with a team of 2 designers and 6 developers. I was leading the design for the responsive web site, and my colleague was designing Ilta-Sanomat native apps.As soon as we started, I noticed the highly hierarchical structure of the organisation. Higher-ups' decisions and opinions were rarely challenged. The look and feel of the site was locked down to a "tabloid look". A number of elements and layout structures could absolutely not be touched, leaving very little creative freedom for designers. I felt that whatever I would try to push forward, I would need to make its value crystal clear to everyone from day one.

Service design, UI/UX design & prototyping for the largest digital news media in Finland.

Ilta-Sanomat

My work with Ilta-Sanomat continued well past the release of the new responsive site in 2015, which has since then been updated with a new version at the end of 2019. The version I was designing served millions of finns for over 4 years.

Traffic to Ilta-Sanomat increased by nearly 10% after the public release of the responsive website. TNS Metrix, the official traffic ranking service used by finnish news media, showed that Ilta-Sanomat strengthened their lead to their closest competitor Iltalehti.

Increase in traffic

Ilta-Sanomat conducted a survey to measure their readers' subjective satisfaction after the release. The feedback was positive overall. The responsive site was praised for it's increased simplicity, ease of reading, modern look, and quick loading speeds.

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