Service Design Breakfast #4: Work begins after the lunch by Janne Toivola, Futurice
In the 4th Service Design Breakfast talk on 31st of October, 2012 Janne Toivola from Futurice presented the concept of “Validated Design”. Janne is an experienced service designer and analyst having a focus on digital analysis and usability.
Figure 1: Validated design, Futurice
The first thing he highlighted was the notion that most of the designers try to do design using as much analytics as possible but in fact it is always a guesswork and you have barely an idea if the design is gonna work or not. In order to validate the design you need to make implementation, get proper date, test and, what is very important, to do analysis. In other words to cover the whole service live-cycle.
Figure 2: Lifecycle, Futurice
Design The first and very important phase of whole service lifecycle. Janne used expression that to make the process efficient you need to build a wall from bottom to top so and with stable foundations. He told that it is just one way to look at the things. The 5 steps presented below should help in that.
- Business model – the way how you are gonna get the money
- User needs – to figure out what customer wants
- Features and content – requirements
- UI and visual design – code the requirements
- Marketing – how to get people using the service
Later he expressed that very a important factor we shouldn’t forget is the goal you are trying to achieve by design. He thinks that proper design should be an answer to 4 things you, as a designer, try to accomplish.
- Doable – concrete, possible accomplished
- Understandable – something you can crasp
- Measurable – countable
- Beneficial – optimize, better
Validation When you get the service out it is one way to get analytics rolling and get iterative way to looking into service and it’s functionality.
- Report – What happened? How are we doing? Use KPS’s and look at the things from another angle.
- Analize – Try to understand why. It’s usually difficult part.
- Act – Doing the things and changes.
Figure 3: Validation process, Futurice
Analytics He used as an example Google Analytics to show that information is out there but it is hidden for us. Helping to uncover the hidden facts standing behind the whole design process by i.e. answering to questions.
- Business model – Did we meet our goals?
- User needs – Did we reach users we intended to?
- Content and functions – How did people navigate the site and use our content?
- UI and visual design – Are people able to use the design?
- Marketing – where did our users really comes from?
SID students reviews:
This is to me a totally different perspective of looking at things when validating design. I learned a lot from this talk because it forced me to see how powerful the Google analytics tools really was, even though I knew about it, after this talk it made me realized how important it was to use this tool as a behavior pattern reader. I still see it as a quick way of validating and analyzing data even though is not the most reliable it’s the fastest. Hugo Molina
This breakfast was for me a bit different. All speakers beforehand were quite experienced in giving presentations and you could feel that Janne did not belong to that group. His presentation was quite interesting but without funny add-ons, no interesting off topics, just facts. Presentation was given the idea how Janne’s company is approaching the projects. I like the concept of Validated Design. It’s simple and effective. Trying to understand that it came to my mind that many times it can be mixed with verification. You are verifying design by doing checks of drawings and requirements checks but you validate a design by trying out actual product. As my background is in QA this is the main principle that I see everyone should follow (Software Testing Fundamentals) I was positively surprised seeing that Janne is emphasizing analytics phase much. I agree that analysis are very important on every stage of Design process. The only thing I did not like was that he presented just one tool – Google Analytics. When other students approached him asking about different examples, he could not recall any. He wasn’t prepared 
? Nevertheless, whole presentation open my eyes to aspect of processing personal information by 3rd parties companies. I wasn’t aware that so many factors were taken into consideration while doing analysis! Daniel Augustyn
The topic of this breakfast was very interesting to me as I had no previous experience in analytics as part of service design projects. Janne was confronting the previous speaker, Karri-Pekka from Reaktor, by saying that you have no way of knowing if the design will work or not. Instead, he suggested putting analytics in place to verify the success of a new service and basing your design on data you are able to get. We got introduced to the definition of validated design, which was very interesting to me. The work doesn’t stop when you launch a project, you have to verify your design and be ready to make the necessary adjustments and improvements based on your findings. Ekaterina Zhiteneva
The topic was really interesting. Janne gave a clear vision of how to collect data from the users during their navigation. It helps to understand the user behavior and validate the interface. By planning the goals in advance is possible to get a lot of real results as where users are clicking, the most searched words, validate the efficiency of a “button”, most visited pages, where the users come from, compare different UIs for the same page by testing them with different groups, among others. With analytic tools is possible to understand the weakness and the powers of a digital products and services. The analytics results clarify also where users are struggling, vanishing or where they are spending more time. Based on data results is possible also to improve the product or service. To understand more about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and web analytics I suggest to have a look on the following pages: SEOmoz, Noupe, Webtrends and Google Analytics.Jane Vita Figures: Figure 1: Validated design, Futurice Figure 2: Lifecycle, Futurice Figure 3: Validation process, Futurice Figure 4: Goal-driven service development, Futurice 2012
Forth talk: Slideshare presentation: http://www.slideshare.net/Service_Design_Breakfast/work-begins-after-the-launch
Video on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=xDWnoQ03B3k
Link to previous Service Design Breakfast: