How does the law change in 2025?

In 2025, many new companies will enter the area of accessibility requirements. In Finland, the law 306/2019 was amended in 2023 to include a greater number of organizations. 

The new law names all personal transportation, e-commerce, and audiobook services to be included. In 2020 and 2021,  public sector services, financial services, and many of society’s key functions, such as utilities, were already included in the scope.   

The law excludes microservices from accessibility requirements. These are defined as companies with an annual turnover of under 2 million euros.

The detailed requirements remain the same as they were when the EU directive was announced in 2018, only the number of organizations they apply to increases.

What does the law require?

The law requires that all digital services, web pages, mobile applications, smartwatch applications, stand-alone kiosks, ATMs, and so forth pass the requirements set in the EN standard.

Currently, the EU directive 2016/2102 refers to the EN 301 549. This means that websites should observe the accessibility requirements of WCAG 2.1, level AA.  Additionally, websites must include:

1. An accessibility statement concerning known issues and planned improvements.
2. A feedback channel that responds within 14 days of receiving feedback.

In practice, websites can have accessibility issues, but at minimum, you must declare them in a statement. Documenting instead of fixing accessibility issues is not the aim of the law, however.

What consequences does non-compliance have?

The EU accessibility initiative aims to make society more inclusive. Improving accessibility is thus a moral imperative for all organizations concerned about societal responsibility. 

Accessibility is enforced separately in every EU country. Failing to comply with the requirements can lead to a fine, which is proportional to the organization’s turnover. However, to date, there are no clear guidelines or publicly disclosed examples. From the trenches, we have become aware of notable conditional fines levied after the first wave of inspections in Finland.   

How are other companies managing accessibility challenges?

Different types of studies during the past five years have shown that much of the internet is not accessible. According to the widest-reaching study of one million website front pages by WebAim, only 4% of webpages had no issues that automated analysis could detect.

In Finland, the first public official accessibility surveillance report found none of the included 20 websites and four mobile apps were accessible.  Similarly, the Qvik study from 2020 involving fifteen popular Finnish apps discovered no accessible apps at all. 

This indicates two things. First of all, the old software development methods have not been tuned to produce accessible digital services by default. Second, despite the law, companies have not made a big effort to change the situation. This leaves plenty of opportunity to pioneer and innovate with accessible services.  

Why invest in accessible services?

For commercial operators, accessibility can bring additional revenue and save money. You can generate revenue by enabling underserved segments to spend on digital services, by finding new clientele, and by ensuring their smooth transactions. Also, people who don’t have special needs most of the time often benefit a lot from improved accessibility that improves usability for all. Innovative, accessible solutions can attract unexpected new customers from a far.

Cost savings occur in many ways. One of these is the increasing self-service rates across the company, as customers don’t have to contact customer support to complete their transactions or just to complain about their bad experiences. Research by Nucleus has revealed multiple ways poor accessibility increases traditional customer support load. Compliance with the law also mitigates legal risk, both in terms of governmental oversight and group litigation. The latter has been getting increasing attention, especially in the US, in recent years, where a group of law firms specializing in “Digital ADA lawsuits” has emerged.

What should you do next?

Your next step towards better accessibility depends on the stage in the lifecycle of a digital service yours is currently at.  

If you are concerned about your existing services, the path forward is to go through the portfolio of digital services provided and examine the accessibility of each service in turn. If you don’t know the level of accessibility of each service, the first step is to conduct an accessibility audit to find out how accessible the service is. Based on the findings, you should steer the development towards a path that will pave the way for an improved situation in 2025.

If you are building a new service, it’s best to invest in designing and developing accessible-by-default digital systems. Have accessibility specialists or advocates in your team to ensure constant quality assurance for accessibility aspects. Train your teams, developers and designers alike, to understand the basic facts and motivations of accessibility so they can learn more on the fly and become used to creating accessible solutions. 

The time goes by quickly, especially when dealing with legacy systems. Get a head start for 2024, and make sure your roadmap or portfolio of strategic initiatives mentions accessibility – so you won’t be late to the game next year!   

Did you enjoy this article? Take a look at more accessibility-related reads on our blog.

The post New accessibility requirements await in 2025 appeared first on Qvik.

Finding the breakpoint

Nederlandse Spoorwegen is a Dutch national company that has operated for nearly 90 years and employs almost 20,000 people. An organization this large can have a strong resistance to change its ways. However, during the previous decade, NS decided to renew its traditional development model and switch to Agile.

“This breakpoint created an opportunity for us to change how we manage and improve the customer experience. The overall change was huge, but customer journey thinking got a ride on the rails of progress. In about four years, some thirteen teams have adopted the customer journey model”, Cuijpers says.

The organization keeps onboarding new teams to the model as found appropriate.

Why customer journey management helps to create value

Siloes are a recurring issue in large organizations. Teams and departments working independently on connected topics tend to raise borders across their autonomous territory. The flow of information slows down, and consequently, the customer experience suffers from gaps and inconsistencies on the journey caused by poorly aligned service pieces. This compromises the resulting customer experience. 

“Journey management takes customer journeys as the focus of the coordinating work. It forces teams contributing to the same journey to share information actively. It ensures that there should be no loose ends or abrupt terminations on any customer journey.”

Peter Cuijpers, Customer Experience Manager at Nederlandse Spoorwegen

In order to succeed, teams must have the incentive and capability to keep user perspective at heart. This is why the development teams at Nederlandse Spoorwegen include individual UX and service designers.

The NS customer journey management model

In practice, customer journey management calls for the unification of tools and practices that an organization uses to manage development.

“The unification alone helps to lower barriers to communication and improves coordination across teams”, Cuijpers says.

Altogether, the NS model includes three primary levels: journey framework, macro journeys, and micro journeys. Micro journeys have clear ownership within the development teams. One team can own up to three micro journeys, and each micro journey feeds into one or more backlogs.

Journeys have a shared documentation and tracking model, so each has shared metrics and similarly presented phases, steps, and storyboards. The journeys live in a dedicated system that is accessible to all teams.

Key takeaways from implementing customer journey management

Cuijpers and Myrthe Montijn, from Nederlandse Spoorwegen’s partner company, Koos Service Design, presented several learnings from switching to the new mode. They specifically dealt with a large organization’s complexity and natural change resistance, leading them to lessons on what is essential in successful change management.

The five takeaways by Cuijpers and Montijn:

1. Demonstrate design thinking for internal change management
2. Uniform building blocks
3. Make the management tools simple and pragmatic
4. Celebrate wins but keep going strong
5. Dedicate time and head space for the change

The first point is about using design methods to drive the transformation. This includes stakeholder interviews, co-creation workshops, and generally following the iterative process of build, test, and learn – which is why you need to have designers involved.

Unified ways of doing things are crucial in successfully aligning all teams towards mutual goals. Nederlandse Spoorwegen noticed that although teams picked up on the idea of journeys right away, they started implementing them in various ways. The company was able to get things on the right track by providing well-designed journey templates, metrics (business & CX), software tools to deploy them, and a governance model. In order for the management software to be appropriately used, it must be practical and accessible (takeaway 3).

Last but not least, make results visible and known across the organization to keep your teams motivated to stay on the new path. Even though attributing success may not always be straightforward, the change process needs positive reinforcement, as it will take time to see the outcomes fully (takeaways 4 and 5).

External parties that ensure that everything is moving in the right direction can also help facilitate change. Outside facilitation and governance was one of the roles of Koos in Nederlandse Spoorwegen’s process.

The biggest benefits

The most significant gain from the journey management approach was seen recently, in a project involving Tier’s e-bike. The new NS app feature allowed this two-wheeled mode of mobility to be easily booked, planned, and paid for. 

“This innovation project was fully customer journey-led in which all participants – designers, product owners, IT architects and partners – used the journey as the ‘boundary object’. The journey approach really helped to get everyone to work from a shared perspective and create a good customer experience”, Cuijpers concludes. 

In the Tier e-bike project, the tooling made discussions and decision-making easier and was used to build up the journey.

How to get started with customer journey management

Customer journeys are always a great starting point for the comprehensive management of any product or service experience. It depends on the size of the total service portfolio what is a feasible way to start. If you have a large and complicated organization such as NS, you need to look for a suitable opening in timing and specific starting points.

The larger your organization, the more likely your roadmap will start with a small number of teams and will take a long time to extend to every part of the organization. Starting small is how NS is also managing its transition. 

The crucial factor is the presence of design. Before the NS organization transformed, they had no designers to speak of. After the transformation, recruiting designers became possible, paving the way for journey management. This is a challenging way to start because it requires designers to discover their place in the evolving organization and simultaneously establish new working models for everybody! However, this NS example shows that this can be achieved. 

Leadership wants to be customer-centric, but it needs designers to show how to do it. 

Read more

• Marc Stickdorn’s books
• McKinsey article on customer journey management

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At Qvik, our digital product designers have been experimenting and reviewing several of these products. Here’s what we think about possibilities.

What counts as a generative AI tool?

The number of tools incorporating machine learning and various artificial intelligence features is constantly growing. Many simple and old tools, such as Microsoft PowerPoint, have started using modern tech solutions under the hood. Yet all software with generative AI features are not prime examples of the category. 

For this story, generative AI refers to all tools that, regardless of their underlying technology, can produce content similar to human-made creations in terms of complexity and, at times, aesthetics. You could call them “creative co-pilots,” as many tech companies favor the term co-pilot when referring to these solutions. This definition excludes some AI-enabled assistant software, such as meeting note-takers or research platforms like HeyMarvin, which all utilize AI/ML features but are not intended to be similarly generative. 

Furthermore, we focus on recently released tools or new features that have a chance of complementing usual designer workflows. These applications were not available until a few years ago.

Several large tool categories are consequently excluded. These include video, presentation, animation, and documentation generation tools. While each of these categories is ripe with multiple exciting applications that may be extremely valuable for some UX designers, they are outside the core of the craft. 

How do you get your hands on gen AI tools?

Most of the tested tools are available online using a web browser. They usually offer a free, trial, or demo mode so you can get a feeling for their functionality without a paid license. However, you are required to use a social login or create an account.

Only a few apps, such as Photoshop, always require a desktop installation. Therefore you are encouraged to go and try them out for yourselves.

Overview of the tools we have explored

Our product designers have been trying out many tools across different varieties of creative production. We currently see the design-relevant generative AI landscape in four areas and find that there are already multiple products available in each category, as outlined in the attached table:

These tools can be used at several stages of the professional digital product design process: design research, concept/service design, UX design, and continuous development.

In the following, we’ll highlight the most exciting tools and their applications in each category.

Text and dialogue tools top picks

ChatGPT and Perplexity AI are currently the most prominent tools for getting textual answers from AI. The applications are similar and share underlying technology, as Perplexity is built upon the same GPT technology as ChatGPT, just a different variant. Both rely on natural language as a way to interact with them. 

While intuitive in a way, as a form of interface, they also present the user with a modest cold start or blank page problem as the human needs to understand how to talk to AI. The way to interact, called “prompting,” resembles natural conversation, but the interfaces don’t feel quite finished yet.

While uncluttered text prompts can feel clear in a way Linux/Unix command line prompt does, they are also not user-friendly in guiding users to discover all available functionalities and options.  

Once you get the conversation going, the wonderful and scary feature of text tools is that they can provide questions to virtually any question or challenge you can throw at them. Text AI tools can be beneficial for design research, ideation, and support idea & and problem validation. 

Example use cases in which text tools can support you today:

• Benchmark existing solutions
• Assist in problem validation
• Do “synthetic” user research to help develop research guides
• List known solutions to help ideation
• Copywriting and proofreading

One of the best use cases is to think of them as untiring assistants who can always answer your stupid questions and remind you of things that may have been lost to memory because you do something so infrequently. When they complement your memory, you should recognize if the presented ideas are sensible and relevant in your current context.

For all non-native speakers, AI tools offer unprecedented spelling checking and copywriting assistance. The language they produce tends to be always grammatically correct. This functionality helps you to spot any errors. Some solutions take this further. Copy.AI promises to create full-blown content or specific text assets following the brand’s tone of voice.

Issues and limitations in text generation

Known issues with text-generating AI lie with their hallucination tendencies. While AI may produce grammatically correct and plausible-sounding responses, these responses may be total gibberish. Thus, any literal reading is strongly discouraged. Perplexity AI can help the user to do fact-checking by offering web-based references.

References are helpful, but the user must remember that those may be unreliable also. Text generating AI is best used for inquiry, not authority.
ChatGPT itself offers an insightful advise in Reid Hoffman’s GPT4 themed book:

Human beings should interact with a powerful LLM with caution, curiosity, and responsibility. A powerful LLM can offer valuable insights, assistance, and opportu- nities for human communication, creativity, and learning, but it can also pose significant risks, challenges, and ethical dilemmas for human society, culture, and values.

Text tools have limits to both their input and output. They don’t remember the entire conversation history, even if they may give a good illusion of it. Users can work around the input limitations by chunking their content, but the input buffer size currently limits their usability for larger tasks, such as translating long pieces of text.

Visual image generation top picks

Midjourney is currently the most popular and effective image-from-text generation tool. Midjourney can already create production-quality images that can replace human illustrations in most applications. Created by a company of the same name, Midjourney is accessible through the messaging platform Discord, which is its most significant limitation, in our opinion.   

The best part of image creation is that, unlike with text generation, you always see what you’ll get. There are no facts to check, a simple visual inspection will suffice to tell if the AI hit the stop or missed. Operation is simple, you first provide a prompt and then receive four or so low resolution candidates out of which you can request more variations or high resolution version.  

There are several other text-to-image tools out there. Dall-E, DreamStudio, and Runway offer their own solution, each with slightly different technology features and UI. For instance, DreamStudio includes a simple way to enter negative prompts and upload images to guide image creation.

Below, you can find a collage of the different images produced with the same prompt in the three applications mentioned above. First there are low resolution preview candidates.

Low resolution image variations

Prompt: A scandinavian blonde female in her early fifties in a business attire using a mobile phone in a cafe in the evening

High resolution images

Visual imagery continues with tools supporting human visual output rather than building everything from scratch. For instance, AutoDraw can guide you to draft simple vector graphics from freehand illustrations quickly. This solution could be helpful in creating supplementary images for storyboards or similar intermediate artifacts.

You may have heard of Stable Diffusion and wonder why it wasn’t mentioned here. The reason is that Stable Diffusion is a technology that several applications, such as DreamStudio, use, but which in itself is not easy to use without some technical knowledge.

Issues and limitations in visual image generation

Known issues with image generation have to do with accuracy and false details. When it comes to fine details that matter greatly to humans but might be missed by AI, such as spelling text or numbers or the number of digits in one’s hand, the machines have been hilariously prone to failure.

Human shapes easily take an uncanny character, making them useless. Luckily, a professional designer can spot issues immediately and revise or regenerate images to get around.

Image generators currently also have built-in limitations regarding image resolution and dimensions. For instance, their output may be insufficient for some applications, as models currently produce images of at maximum 1024×1024 pixels (Midjourney and Dall-E). In some cases, you can work around this by using additional generative tools such as Adobe Photoshop 25 (2024) and its Generative Fill, which can expand your canvas area as required or use tools to upscale the image with AI.  

Interacting with image-generation tools can also be frustrating. Midjourney sometimes has unexpected delays, and all applications can give you a hard time in controlling the exact content of their renderings.  

Finally, image creation is suspect to various biases. For example, people of different ages, color, and ethnicities will not be equally likely to be portrayed by the AI model. Thus, users should be cautious and adjust their prompting to avoid biases. 

Full UI layouts are not there yet

Creating UI designs autonomously or assisting humans to create them faster is the value promise of a number of services. However, our overall opinion is that the maturity of UI design solutions is clearly less than that of text and image tools. 

Tools such as UIzard and Gamma.App offer sophisticated “website from scratch” functionalities. Each takes a totally different approach, but intends to deliver complete package from a minimalist starting point. Both offer the user  freedom  and tools to refine the output further.

The issue is that none of the tools produces production level content. Basic web design is such a widespread but seldom required service that just mass generating new fresh starts is not really called upon. If you are however looking to prototype marketing websites, generative AI may give you a bit of custom touch and options to choose from.

Figma AI plugins

The other approach is to offer AI plugins that add new powers to existing design tools. For instance, searching for “AI” in Figma community currently produces exactly 100 hits among plugins. Most plugins are fresh, have at most a couple of thousand downloads, and have yet to be rated by users.

In our opinion, Figma AI plugins feel immature. Some of them show the potential to provide valuable features but don’t yet have the right solution for the right problem. With some plugins, it seems questionable whether they even have much AI under the hood. As such, we think they don’t yet fit professional UX designers’ workflow and can only provide random inspiration. 

To highlight the scope of plugins, we name some examples. UXpilot.ai generates color and gradient combinations with accessible contrast checking. Unfortunately, the user can’t control the generation, greatly reducing its usefulness. Magician is a bundle of generative features inside a plugin, offering text-to-image image or icon and AI copywriting. Our designers found the most promise within text-to-icon generation and interactive copywriting.  

In a different direction from graphical UI design, QoQo.ai plugin uses Figma as a platform to pull together various parts of the complete UX design process: personas, information architecture, affinity mapping, user interviews, and the kind. This Swiss army knife tool raised privacy concerns, which somewhat limited our testing.

Finally, we have Builder.io which is an AI solution for creating front-end code from Figma designs. It is designed to extract UI components defined in Figma as code in a desired framework. It is also the most popular Figma AI plugin so far and works surprisingly well to a certain degree, but it too shows signs of an early age or potential for further development.

Conclusion: next week, the world of generative AI may be totally different

The fast development of AI technologies means we can expect technologists to keep users alert for many years to come. New tools are popping up daily; some may prove to be game changers. For UX design, the situation is such that for some use cases, AI can provide effective assistance, for others, it may slow down or even hinder design work. This matches the description of the “jagged technological frontier” of AI assistance in knowledge work. What’s important about the concept of the frontier is that a professional should understand their position: is AI helpful or harmful to my productivity and creativity at each step.

Currently, modalities (text, image, video, GUIs) are merging, and the categorical boundaries we’ve presented today may only hold for a short time. For instance, under the hood, video avatar tool D-ID offers a combination of Stable Diffusion and GPT 3, which gives an idea of how these tools blend.

We can expect the same from OpenAi’s next-generation flagship products, ChatGTP and Dall-E. In fact, OpenAI has already announced that ChatGPT will gain new skills in October 2023, allowing it to see, hear, and speak.

So, the expectations remain high. Some things we know today are worth paying attention to when they become public. These include the next generation of GPT and  Dall-E  (GPT 5 and Dall-E 3, the latter of which is already available at Bing), as well as Google’s imagen. Google’s imagen will not be released as a stand-alone product, but will be found incorporated into various Google applications in the future.

As Figma acquired an AI company called Diagram in the summer of 2023, there are high hopes that  Diagram’s Genius will become a top choice among AI co-pilots in Graphical UI design. 

As the tools change, new use cases become possible. One current concern for using text models in user research is data privacy and security. In future so called proprietary models in which you have full control of your data, are expected to replace currently popular public models. This will impact qualitative design research significantly when it happens.  

We will definitely be watching!

Written by Lassi A Liikkanen, with big thanks for the research by Emilia Iinatti, Roosa Kotilainen, Elias Maliniemi, Juha Solla, Laura Walden, Emilia Mannila, Minna Kuivalainen and Marianna Salminen.

Contact us for more information!

The post Digital Designer’s Creative AI Assistants – Fall 2023 edition appeared first on Qvik.

In the second phase, Electrolux built various ecosystem apps each serving a certain type of appliance, like Electrolux’s Wellbeing appliances. Several experiences were still being developed in parallel for different product categories and business areas.

“In these phases, our IoT work didn’t scale well, a lot of similar problems were being solved in different ways, and our digital products did not always meet the expectations of our customers,” says Andreas Larsson.

Larsson is the Engineer Director of Digital Experiences at Electrolux and is responsible for the engineering solutions for all user-facing digital products, brands and business areas globally.

“Financially, it was a big decision to get started with the renewal, since we still needed to maintain all the old applications until we could replace them, and we also needed to keep releasing new appliances during the process.”

At the moment, the company is merging all of its smart home appliance applications under a single codebase and cloud implementations. By the end of the year, the global codebase will support eight apps: Electrolux, AEG and Frigidaire will have one iOS and Android application for all their appliances, and all the other brands will be combined in the +home app for iOS and Android.

Read more about Electrolux’s IoT journey from our previously released reference article Electrolux and the evolution of IoT.

Establishing a digital product organisation within Electrolux

To make their digital product development smarter and more efficient, Electrolux established a digital product organisation within the company. This required changes in organisation, processes and talent.

There are now more than 210 people developing Electrolux’s digital products, primarily in Sweden, Italy and Malaysia. The people are divided into more than 15 teams, and the user base is expected to exceed 30 million users in a few years.

“Recruiting such a large number of competent people was a challenging task, and that’s when Qvik came into the picture.”

Andreas Larsson, Engineer Director of Digital Experiences at Electrolux

Qvik has been working with Electrolux since the spring of 2021. During this time, the teams have made important decisions on technology choices and kept pace with the constantly evolving world of connected appliances and experiences.

“We develop our products in-house with the help of consultants integrated into our teams, and we are constantly looking for new talent.”

As a successful company with over 100 years of history and its own ways of working, the corporation has also had to adapt to the new agile ways of software development.

“For instance, hardware manufacturing methods don’t apply well to software development, and the budgets need to be planned differently as well.”

Biweekly release trains and clear OKRs keep things rolling

Larsson explains that Electrolux manages the complexity of its digital product development by sharing a set of principles and ceremonies for the teams. The teams work according to a set of agile methods but are not strictly committed to a single one.

“We also have some criteria for how the teams can be put together. For instance, teams can’t be scattered across more than two time zones and physical locations.”

Electrolux has found a global biweekly release train to be very useful: a release goes out at a set time every other week. If you miss the train, you must wait for the next one.

The quality of the work is expected to be production-grade when the release train starts, and there are structured quality and decision-making processes all the way to releasing the apps to app stores. The teams have now been making biweekly releases since March 2022.

“Without the rigour of the trains, someone would always have to fix just one small bug before the release, and we now have too many teams not to release the value provided by all of the others on schedule. ”

Andreas Larsson, Engineer Director of Digital Experiences at Electrolux

Electrolux’s digital product development has set clear objectives and key results and figures to keep the teams on the same page. This helps the teams measure their success and maintain the quality of the products.

“In software development, knowing exactly what is going on when something is released is a great asset. For instance, as we instantly know if the app’s login time goes from 1 to 4 seconds, we can start fixing it right away. ”

The sheer number of teams and individuals working with Electrolux’s digital products also requires a balancing act: the teams need to have autonomy in their work but, at the same time, having no overarching or shared direction will lead to too much local optimisation.

Join Qvik Sweden’s next Digital Product Meetup?

This article is based on Qvik Sweden’s Digital Product Meetup held on June 7. The DiP meetups are a place for product managers, product owners and people in product management to discuss and learn about relevant themes.

The next event will be held after the summer holidays. If you are interested in joining Qvik Sweden’s next DiP meetup, please leave us your contact details in the form below and we will send you an invitation at the end of the summer.

If you are based in Finland and would like to join Qvik’s DiP Meetup in Helsinki, leave your contact details to the Helsinki form and we’ll invite you to the next one.

The post How does Electrolux create its scalable world-class IoT solutions? By bringing software to the core of the company strategy. appeared first on Qvik.

“At first, our only source for digital CX feedback was our official feedback system that was designed for complex customer complaints and was not in the context of our digital touchpoints. However, we soon realized that this was not enough”, says Terveystalo’s Juhana Schulman.

Terveystalo then moved to Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys to capture a broader perspective of their digital CX. Then, they introduced the Customer Effort Score (CES) survey, which measures how much effort a customer has to put into an interaction with the company in the specific touchpoint.

“One important lesson we learned is that only asking for feedback after a transaction means missing feedback from unsuccessful attempts.”

In addition to these surveys, Terveystalo also collects spontaneous and proactive feedback from various sources. They have automated analysis of CES surveys with the help of Lumoa service and also manually classify feedback into categories in Excel for building even deeper empathy towards customers and being able to prioritise the most impactful topics.

How to turn data into better customer experiences?

Terveystalo’s digital team has a weekly process in which relevant parties go through customer feedback using digital whiteboard service Miro. Data is imported directly from Excel and Lumoa to Miro, which helps the teams visualize feedback and discuss potential improvements.

Terveystalo considers CES to be a better metric than NPS for digital touchpoints, as it provides more actionable insights. They also believe that qualitative feedback is even more important than quantitative feedback.

Their practices have proven efficient: Terveystalo’s Medoma mobile application won the 2023 Grand One Award in the categories of Best Digital Service and Best Service Design. Medoma frees up healthcare professionals’ time for patient work.

Qvik has been involved in producing the Medoma service together with Terveystalo and other partners. In addition to this, Qvik has also been involved in creating the new Terveystalo.com and the design system and the renewal of Terveystalo’s occupational health care services.

Key takeaways

1. Ask feedback proactively and in context after the most essential points of the digital customer journey.
2. Focus on qualitative data. Use quantitative data sparingly.
3. Have earmarked resources for analyzing data and acting on it.
4. Automate what you can, but make sure to immerse yourself and others in raw customer feedback too.
5. It’s a process, not a project: work systematically but always keep moving and improving.

The post How Terveystalo improves customer experiences in digital health appeared first on Qvik.

These were the improvements the team made:

• Address critical user feedback by resolving major UX issues
• Refresh App and Play store presence with new app images
• Design and implement rating prompts around happy moments
• Reset App Store reviews

Each of these steps was quite a small investment in terms of design and development work, but together they did wonders to the ratings!

“The biggest effort in hacking ratings is having a designer identify and visualize the most promising happy moments in using the service”, Ukkonen says.

A key observation related to this is that by proactively asking customers to rate the application we are more likely to get positive ratings and reviews as well. Customers tend to give feedback mostly when they are not satisfied, not when things work as they should.

A crucial insight we’ve gained is that actively encouraging customers to rate our application can lead to more positive ratings and reviews. Typically, customers are more inclined to provide feedback when they experience dissatisfaction, rather than when the application functions as expected.

“Doing the groundwork properly requires input from developers and the PO as well as taking a look at analytics data. After that, it’s a fairly straightforward task for the developers to make it possible for users to provide the reviews.”

The work took only a few days of Jesse’s time but proved to have a huge return in ratings.

Try Qvik’s ratings simulator to understand what would happen if you had 1,000 favorable reviews more

Considering the different hacking options available, it’s good to forecast how your ratings could develop as a result of rating activation. We have a tool for you to help predict what might happen.

The Qvik ratings hack simulator is a simple calculation tool to help set goals and assess your chances in hacking ratings. Starting with your current app ratings, it allows you to quickly see the outcome in overall score as well as rating distribution.

For instance, if you currently have an average rating of 2.0 with 500 ratings, how many 4- or 5-star ratings do you need to rise above the critical 4-star level? The answer is almost 1,000 five-star ratings. Whether this is a lot to ask depends on your overall pool of passive users.

Give it a try over here!

Further reading:

• The best app store rating hacks in 2023
• Survey: The best-rated apps get the most downloads
• How many stars does your app have?
• Mobile App Ratings and Reviews: Where to Start and How to Win

For background research, big thanks to senior product designer Jesse Ukkonen and Phaneendra Adabala, Qvik’s front-end developer mastermind. Another big hand goes to developer Mehmet Sukan who created the Qvik App Ratings Simulator based on the author’s idea.

Illustration: Niina Nissinen

The post Case study: How the K-Ruoka team doubled their average rating appeared first on Qvik.

Read this article to get an idea of the current opportunities for rating hacking, and the limitations imposed by the platforms. The article is inspired by K-Ruoka’s product team, including Qvik’s designer Jesse Ukkonen – they very recently worked their App Store rating from 2.2 to 4.4 stars in a couple of months.

We will write more about this soon, but you can already test Qvik’s app ratings simulator here.

Why work on app ratings?

Research consistently shows that consumers are sensitive to application ratings. If your app is stuck at below 3 stars, many users will think twice before downloading it. This can be critical for the product’s success if you are trying to build business with the app alone and compete with other similar products. You really need to achieve at least three stars to even be considered by the consumers.

This is not an issue limited to app-only products such as mobile games. Even brands that have a wider presence, such as web services, brick and mortar, or third-party retailers, can have their brand negatively affected by poor ratings. Data shared by AppTentive (by Alchemer) showed that a 1- or 2-star rating for a well-known brand’s app has a negative impact on the brand as a whole.

We have recently confirmed similar customer opinions among Finnish mobile users. Over 80% of consumers polled in 2023 show sensitivity to app ratings and over 70% of them also read the reviews. Consumers are particularly interested in critical reviews and developer responses.

Why do people rate and review apps?

App reviews, written feedback and star ratings have become a standard method for users to give feedback and communicate their success or frustration with the app.

Spontaneous feedback is usually very polarized. People are either ecstatic and super happy with the app or, more probably, infuriated with it because something has gone against their expectations or created some form of friction.

AppTentive says that companies usually receive spontaneous feedback from only 1% of their user base, while the “silent majority” (the 99%) never voice their opinion. The bottom 1% are very dangerous to the brand, whereas the silent majority conceals an opportunity for boosting reviews and countering the vocal, negative minority.

What’s an app store rating hack?

Hacking is a loaded word and does not fit too well in this context, because rating hacking does not have anything to do with illegitimate access to the application store. Rather, it is fully dependent on individual humans leaving favorable ratings for an app. 

Rating hacking is best described as a collection of practices aimed at persuading users to leave positive reviews as a result of actual positive experiences with the product. 

Historically, acquiring app reviews has been considered a possible, if not outright questionable, method of buying your way to the top. There are still companies selling positive app ratings and reviews as a service, but we don’t condone this practice or consider it to be a valid rating hacking method.

Paid reviews also go against platform guidelines and can have several negative consequences. First, it means that your $0.10 five-star reviews may be gone the next day if the account posting them becomes permanently banned from the platform. If it becomes obvious that you, as a publisher, have been complicit in the fake reviews, you will be warned, and in the worst case, your account and app could be banned.

Legitimate rating hacks

In short, hacking ratings works in the following ways, from most convenient to most disruptive:

• Make your product page more attractive in the application store
• Activate your users in happy moments to post reviews and ratings
• Respond to non-positive user reviews in the hope of persuading users to revise their ratings and reviews
• Improve your product to reduce the incidence of bad user experiences described in reviews
• Mitigate known bad rating risks by proactively capturing negative feedback privately inside the app instead of letting it flood over to the platform
• Report inappropriate reviews to the platform  
• Reset App Store ratings during an updates
• Relaunch the app as a totally new app

Of these actions, activating users in happy moments deserves a bit of elaboration. It refers to prompting users to give feedback at the end of successful user journeys, when there is reason to believe that the user is as satisfied as possible with the app.

Rules of the game: what you can do on the platforms?

The previous list ended with two radical options: resetting ratings and releasing a completely new app. Resetting the ratings of an existing app is only available on the App Store, and the publisher can do that with every update if they choose. The reviews will remain, however. The only way to reset Google Play Store ratings or get rid of negative reviews anywhere is to release a brand new app. That’s probably never the preferred choice. The only remaining thing to do is to flag and report hostile reviews.  

Looking at the easier options of the previous lists, a simple trick is to activate the silent majority with some well-placed prompts.

There are differences between the platforms in how you can activate users. For a few years now, iOS has been offering a built-in option for asking users to rate and review the app on the App Store. You can push the request no more than three times in a 365-day period. On Android, no such limitation exists and developers are free to implement the prompt as they see fit.

Further reading:

• Survey: The best-rated apps get the most downloads
• How many stars does your app have?
• Mobile App Ratings and Reviews: Where to Start and How to Win

Illustration: Aija Malmioja

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To better understand the Nordic market, we investigated the opinions of Finnish consumers (N=1,000, representative of the full population) in March 2023. The results show that their thoughts are well-aligned with global research.

Ratings matter to Finns too

The main finding is that the average rating has a strong influence on the intention to download or dismiss an app. Over 80% of Finns agree that apps scoring over 4 stars are worth a try, whereas apps getting under 3 stars are likely not to be tried at all. Only less than a third of the respondents say that ratings don’t matter (31%) or that they never read the reviews (21%).

We also learned that verbal reviews are surprisingly important. Nearly 3 in 4 consumers always check the reviews before downloading, paying attention to the publisher’s responses to user comments, and also look at the critical reviews in particular.

Why should you care about getting the best app ratings and reviews?

What we now found in polling Finnish consumers is that app ratings and reviews matter a lot to people when thinking about acquiring a new app. This is a good reminder that application developers must take user reviews seriously, do their best to deliver great products and put some effort into maintaining their application store presence if they want to see organic growth for their product.

We posted a great article in 2019 about a practice known as rating hacking. While many of the technical steps outlined in that guide still hold, we will very soon release an updated article that takes into account the latest developments in platforms. It also tells the story of a very recent, successful rating hack on the App Store.

Illustration: Niina Nissinen

For more information

Lassi A. Liikkanen

Director of Product Design and Insight

+358503841508 lassi.liikkanen@qvik.fi

Juha “Millennium” Falck

Director of New Business Acquisition

+35850 362 2659juha.falck@qvik.fi

The post Survey: The best-rated apps get the most downloads appeared first on Qvik.

Qvik’s own Figma wizard, Jukka Forsten, talks about his experience of creating a new and improved design library for our customer Terveystalo, Finland’s biggest private health care provider.

Figma introduced new component properties and design tokens last year, so updating the design library became necessary to get the most out of the tool. It meant getting rid of huge variant sets, improving the library structure, and support for multi-brand structures using design tokens. 

“The old library followed an atomic design structure, and not many changes were made to the atomic component levels, apart from adding the new design tokens”, says Qvik’s senior designer Jukka Forsten.

“These tokens now contain colors, text styles, shadows and spacings. The improved file structure also has its own pages for every atomic level and a documentation frame of what you can do with the component.”

After refactoring a big bunch of component variants into properties and updating the structure of the Figma file, the new library looks compact and clean. The number of input field component variants decreased from over a hundred to just seven. Impressive!

Although the main reason for the update was multi-brand support, it also made the maintenance of this new library much easier. Updating existing components and adding new ones is now a lot faster. 

“The hardest part of developing the design system was changing the naming logic of design tokens. Naming is hard”, Forsten says.

Migrating to the new library can take time, but luckily it can be done step by step, as both libraries are still in use. So far, only a couple of teams have started using the new library, but as the work continues, all teams will be able to harness the power of this new design library.

Grasping the full potential of FigJam

Figma introduced their own whiteboard tool, FigJam, less than two years ago. It has improved in leaps and bounds and become the second-most popular digital whiteboard tool (UX Tools, Design tools survey, 2022), just slightly behind Miro. But what makes FigJam so awesome?

Vitali Gusatinsky, Design Lead at Fraktio, shares his power user tips and amazes us with some FigJam magic.
FigJam’s interactivity tools make teamwork smooth and easy: temporary reactions help direct people’s attention in the file, and you can request people to follow your screen with the spotlight mode.

You can use the pen tool to draw directly onto the board with an iPad. In addition you can vote, invite guest editors and use audio sessions. So no need to huddle.

Drawing simple user flows is super quick. With a few clicks, you can add stickies, draw flows, and organize and create a structure easily.
“This is what makes FigJam different from tools like Miro. I can work quickly and get my ideas quickly out into the real world”, Vitali says.
“There is also support for semantics: just type two hashtags + a space to immediately give a subheading style to an item.”

Vitali’s tip for efficient use of the tool is to learn the shortcuts. For example, you can tidy up a bunch of rectangles with ctrl + option + T to organize them into a grid with smart selectors.

Groups and sections are great for organizing content. You can use basic grouping (command + G) if you want multiple objects to behave as one. But scaling a group can still be messy, especially when using text. 

Sections are the new hotness in FigJam

FigJam’s sections are easy to scale, move around and nest inside one another. Sections can bring a lot of structure to a large amount of content while retaining legibility.

“These can seem like small, trivial things, but it all adds up when working on something.” Vitali says.

“I can very quickly develop an idea into something that I can then iterate on further, because I don’t want to spend all my time working on my first draft.”

FigJam and Figma also work well together, and you can use Figma assets from the shared libraries and bring in layouts from Figma. This allows you to brainstorm easily, as you can add ideas directly into the layouts instead of using sticky notes, bring the layout back to Figma, and iterate it. 

Figma offers lots of widgets like timeline and calendar, and multiple templates with great instructions on how to use them to facilitate workshops properly.

Figma advocates make users’ lives easier

Figma’ Designer advocate Hugo Raymond gives insight into what Figma advocates do and how they contribute to the community. An advocate is a passionate Figma user, experienced designer, and someone engaged with the community. 

“The current Figma advocate team is a 17-people mix of different roles globally. Besides sales and marketing, they collect user feedback, represent user needs and support product teams”, Raymond says.

“We are trusted to drive value through meaningful interactions that help make people feel heard and get feedback on their experiences” 

Advocates contextualize feature releases into designers’ workflows and have the opportunity to develop content that the community needs. For instance, Figma’s new advocate, Lauren Andres, publishes a tip based on her most recent discoveries every single week. Lauren has highlighted things like a documentation plugin created by the community, EightShapes Specs. This plugin makes it super easy to summarize the styles you are using, like border radius, line height, letter spacing and font size.

Another advocate, Luis Ouriach, likes to give a breakdown of his best-practice guides in an online digest. He wrote a long article about structuring your teams, projects and files. In it, he introduces some different ways of setting up and managing the structure of your files and projects. 

The final resource tip from Hugo points us to the videos created by Chad Bergman, focusing on how to build a design system. The videos are recorded conversations between him and Jacob Miller, the product manager for design systems at Figma. 

Those 7 hours of content synthesize Jacob’s knowledge about design systems and user needs with Chad’s 20-year experience of the design industry and design system structures. From the videos, you can learn everything from crafting the components and polishing design system versions to providing the documentation inside Figma. 

And remember, Figma’s annual Config conference is coming up in June 2023 in San Francisco. While they are currently accepting talk proposals, most of us should be eagerly waiting for news about tokens as well as the next steps in the possible Adobe-Figma merger. Hugo promised nothing, but we have a strong feeling that it will be an event to look forward to.

This article is based on An Evening with Figma at Qvik – an event held at Qvik’s office in early March for a tightly packed audience of nearly 100. If you wish to hear more about upcoming events, follow Qvik’s events on https://www.meetup.com/qvik-events/.  

The evening’s presentations were:

Jukka Forsten: https://tinyurl.com/62uvm8u8

Hugo Raymonds: https://www.figma.com/community/file/1215974979546434907

Vitali Gusatinsky: https://tinyurl.com/fraktio-figjam

The post Three experts share their tricks for new Figma features appeared first on Qvik.

The result was a new, systematic approach to applying human-centric methodologies to innovation and the optimisation of  the business-related elements of services and products. Through business design, we ensure that the digital services we build are fulfilling our customers’ business requirements and the users’ needs.

The process

Business design is above all a way of operating. It begins with understanding the starting point and targets for development – and the gap between them. As the direction of the future is increasingly uncertain, it makes sense to spend some time on understanding the underlying issues. Where are we really at? What is our goal and why? What does “success” look like?

Business insights are then enriched with customer understanding. By gathering insight, we are able to prioritise the most critical entities for development and outline its direction. That gives us a foundation to innovate and prototype new possibilities. Together with stakeholders and customers, we will then evaluate the alternatives and their effectiveness to form a plan of action. 

Collaboration

Business design ensures that a strategic perspective is maintained throughout the process, and that an innovative entity is also a commercially sound investment. To understand all of the aspects, business designers typically work closely with other specialists.

At Qvik, business designers work with UI/UX and service designers, developers and payment consultants. By collaborating, we ensure that the services we develop are created holistically to cater to different needs and deliver real business impact.

In short, business design is a process that combines a strategic business approach with the collaborative methods and mindsets of design to deliver a customer-centric and viable business solution.

Three ways in which business design can help your business

With business design you can save time and money by ensuring that you are working with the right ideas, at the right time and with the right approach before any changes are made or a line of code is written.

1. Understand your current position and future opportunities from the perspectives of the market and the competition. Set goals that benefit the business.
2. Innovate and test the viability of new ideas cost-effectively.
3. Get a better understanding of why a venture should or should not be carried out: How is it connected to the core business and strategy, and how will it deliver measurable value for the organisation?

Examples of useful exercises in business design

1. Ecosystem mapping

• Defining business goals and establishing problem statements. 
• Identifying the pain points and metrics that define both the current business landscape and future opportunities.
• Understanding how different business models behave for certain target segments, what revenue and costs they will generate, and how they could affect operations and delivery.

2. New product/service development and prototyping

• Turning key customer insights into different business strategies and results.
• Providing feedback on a solution from a business viability perspective.
• Ensuring that a design solution satisfies the needs of customers and the business.

3. Roadmapping & performance metric implementation

• Defining top strategic priorities, breaking down execution into actionable components, and implementing performance measurement against the desired goals.
• Ultimately, driving projects towards positive user and business outcomes.

Written by Qvik’s business designer Katariina Helin – a strategic thinker, who is interested in people and phenomena, the why and the how.

The post The Design of Business appeared first on Qvik.