Luis Orozco, Schibsted’s Product Director, Engagement and Trust, explains that for him, building a company culture started with acknowledging that we all have work lives and personal lives, and these two come with different identities.

“Maintaining two identities takes mental capacity. We want to lower the cognitive load of people so we encourage our people to be themselves at work.”

Luis Orozco, Product Director, Engagement and Trust at Schibsted

For instance, when Orozco introduces himself at work, he also talks about his love and passion for cross-country skiing and good tacos. For Orozco, good tacos are basically as essential as breathing.

“It’s important that people at work see each other as real people, not just titles.”

Company culture isn’t born on a 3-day management retreat

Company culture is not a statement or nice words on a website but the sum of how all employees behave. When people in the company are open, the company culture is open. Culture also shows what you really are, not what you say you are.

Orozco quotes management consultant and writer Peter Drucker: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” The quote doesn’t mean that strategy is not important. It just states the fact that, if your company strategy and company culture are not aligned, your strategy is quickly forgotten.

“It’s really important that the top management has their ear to the ground.”

Luis Orozco, Product Director, Engagement and Trust at Schibsted

The same goes for everyone working in a leadership position. Leaders are responsible for creating trust and psychological safety, which ultimately lead to resilience. They also decide which things are encouraged or discouraged at the workplace.

“This is something that you have to think about consciously, and it’s easy not to.”

Have failure cake and deployment pulla but avoid OKR watermelons

Nordic consumers have a lot in common, and as a pan-Nordic company, Schibsted is well aware of that. But what unites the Nordics above all, according to Orozco’s personal observation, is the love of cake.

“Everybody loves cake. So when we learn, we have cake, and when we launch something, we have cake. We also have this thing called pulla-driven development: every time there is an important deployment, we give pulla to the team”, Orozco says. Pulla is the Finnish word for a sweet bun or cinnamon roll.

The idea is to acknowledge people’s contributions and give credit where due. By celebrating both success and failure, Schibsted aims to build a fearless culture that doesn’t shame people for trying and occasionally also failing.

Work at Schibsted is planned based on a dream of what they would love to have ready by the end of the year, and the dream is based on the company strategy. After defining the dream, the teams define the must-win-battles that lead to this dream coming to a reality and then decide on the Objectives and Key Results they will follow.

OKRs are marked on a confidence sheet in different colors: green is on track, yellow is at risk and red is not achievable.

“What I don’t like to see is the OKR watermelon. That’s when the sheet looks like there’s green, green, green and suddenly, at the end of the planning period, red. It means that the team is not estimating their work confidence and progress as they should.”

Join Qvik’s next Digital Product meetup?

This article is based on Qvik’s Digital Product Meetup held on June 14. The DiP meetups are a place for product managers, product owners and people in product management to discuss and learn about relevant themes. You can check out Luis Orozco’s slides from his talk here.

The next meetup will happen after the summer holidays. If you’re not on the invitation list yet, leave your contact details in the form below.

The post Schibsted’s pan-Nordic company culture is built on trust, honesty, cake and pulla appeared first on Qvik.

Our DEI task force has been busily building visibility inside our company, defining their team’s ways of working, and setting up channels and sessions for info sharing and sparring. Diversity, equity and inclusion is now also a part of our company-level objectives and key results (OKR), where it belongs as an important part of our strategy.

Our DEI strategy development was kicked off by excellent workshops hosted by Inklusiiv’s Yesmith Sánchez and Maija Koponen, who also consulted us on the strategy. Having a partner like Inklusiiv helps us define and understand diversity, equity and inclusion as a natural part of our culture and journey. 

If you want to read our first blog post about why DEI matters and what it means to us at Qvik, check out our article Getting real with diversity, equity and inclusion with help from Inklusiiv.

Diversity, equity and inclusion gives meaningful goals to work towards 

In September, we did a SWOT analysis of the current state of DEI at Qvik and started drafting our concrete next steps. The analysis helped us create development measures and finalize action plans based on our company goals. In addition, it revealed priorities and helped us put the measures in order with a visual representation of company-level owners for each measure.

“A goal without a plan is just a wish.”

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

In short, the DEI roadmap is needed to outline the major steps of internal DEI development. The roadmap obviously allows us to review goals at different impact levels, too.

We grouped our goals into thematic groups based on the business objectives, our SWOT analysis and the main focus areas. The goals were also categorized based on their impact level, with some focusing more on change at the individual level and others on the societal level.

Our main goals for 2023 are:

• Improving DEI awareness internally
• Increasing the sense of inclusion for everyone at Qvik
• Ensuring that the recruitment process is inclusive
• Doing our part to build a more inclusive society

Our DEI goals have been defined and put on the roadmap with the KPIs. So is this it, are we ready to roll? Before we got started, one critical question still needed to be answered:

Could we identify any reasons why this roadmap wouldn’t work? 

Common pitfalls of DEI programs

We noticed that we might have succumbed to the common pitfall of overly optimistic time management. Also, some of our actions – for example, in recruitment and employer branding – needed to be combined rather than executed individually.

Achieving DEI goals can be challenging, and the process involves a number of risks. No matter how realistic or relevant actions you have planned, there are many ways in which a roadmap can fail. Inklusiiv lists the following as the usual suspects:

• The program is built on assumptions, not insight and data
• An excessively programmatic approach – no flexibility in implementation
• An exclusive focus on behavioural change
• No commitment from the leadership 
• Lack of resources
• Reliance on volunteers or minority groups

Regardless of all the careful planning to ensure that we will reach our goals, we are painfully aware of the risks. To mitigate these, we need to pay attention to the following issues:

1. Improving our data collection systems to also support the continuous collection of relevant metrics on diversity, equity and inclusion. 
2. Getting everyone at Qvik onboard, as DEI isn’t just our task force’s “development project” – major changes can be needed, which is why all Qvikies need to understand that DEI benefits everyone in the company.
3. The resources (money and time) we need to allocate to DEI for it to remain in the spotlight.

Identifying these risks is vital, but so is taking measures to avoid them. Outside help is more than welcome here to put all the options on the table.

What next?

Companies that plan to make DEI a part of their development roadmaps often forget that striving for a more diverse and inclusive workplace isn’t just a one-off development project. It’s a continuous journey. 

Just like in software development and design, working on DEI should be an iterative and incremental process in which learning (and failing) happens early and often. Taking this mindset from our own consultancy work and applying it to understanding and promoting DEI is a valuable insight.

To succeed, a DEI plan must always align with business objectives and give a competitive edge to the company. There is a tendency to lump DEI with HR issues because of its links to culture development, recruitment, and retention.

Instead of featuring on Board mission slides or HR development roadmaps, diversity, equity and inclusion should be felt in every part of the organization – from values, processes, and leadership to all communication.

A DEI roadmap is an important part of keeping track of the goals, but the actions taken to reach them also need to be visible, measurable, constant and ongoing.

In concrete terms, our roadmap actions are already having an impact on key results at the company level, building our Code of Conduct, setting up monthly town hall meetings, internal and external communications, and development processes. Most importantly, we are talking more about DEI matters from different perspectives at Qvik. 

Our task force has been a torch-bearer and led by example in making DEI a visible, constant, and ongoing part of communication and running things. But like I said, we need to get every Qvikie on board with the change. This requires more education and training and further cooperation between our offices in Sweden and Finland. 

The post Deep-dive into Qvik’s diversity, equity and inclusion roadmap 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.

Then again, work produced by AI algorithms can make you feel things and inspire you. And these pieces are a part of today’s art scene, whether I like it or not. Also, the algorithms are getting so good that it can already be difficult to tell the difference between human and AI-made art – and proper AI art is often a combination of the two.

But I hate AI art. Sometimes because it looks awful and sometimes because it looks annoyingly good.

Our senior product designer Samuli Saarikoski is Qvik’s best expert on the AI art scene and also produces his own art with the help of AI. You can follow his work on his Instagram account, @samulisaarikoski, among other places.

We started to define Qvik’s AI illustration guidelines with him, our product designer and brand guard Jukka Forsten and our software engineer Ossi Hanhinen.

Get ready for some spooky guinea pigs

As we started drawing up the guidelines on Midjourney, Saarikoski did a simple test. He wrote turquoise guinea pig using a laptop on a table, pastel color palette, character illustration art, digital art, concept art.

It took about 30 seconds, and this is what we got at first.

“Usually, the first versions you get don’t make a lot of sense, and you often have to flounder through a bunch of horrible versions before getting something good out of it”, Saarikoski says.

“My favourite thing in Midjourney is the current remaster feature. It does the best AI magic and has the potential to save you from the horrors.”

Here’s what we ended up with after the remaster tricks and Samuli’s magic.

We have a thing for guinea pigs at Qvik, since one of our office mascots is a turquoise guinea pig. Even though our guinea pig got lost in our office renovation and only lives in our memories now, it made sense to continue testing the algorithm with guinea pig stuff.

Here’s tiny cute and adorable turquoise guinea pig adventurer dressed in a warm overcoat on a winter’s day, jean-baptiste monge, anthropomorphic.

After a decent amount of variations, remasters and other magic, this is what Saarikoski was able to get out of it.

Saarikoski explained that, because of the lack of “training”, AI often produces extra-horrible things when creating animals. It’s also better at creating more common animals like cats or dogs but seems to struggle more when it comes to guinea pigs.

If you are spooked by what you just saw, it’s because we’re in Uncanny Valley

The ‘uncanny valley’ is a phenomenon that makes some people experience discomfort when seeing something that resembles a human but is not quite human, such as human-like androids, robots, or even clowns. I believe – and studies have shown – that it also applies to seeing animal-like things that are more or less off.

We were talking about this with Forsten and Saarikoski, and Forsten requested a set of AI guinea pigs with the word “horror” in the description.

So here’s turquoise horror guinea pig using a laptop on a table, pastel color palette, horror dark art, character illustration art, digital art, concept art.

Interestingly, when Saarikoski started remastering these images, the algorithms replaced the horror with cuteness.

The AI was like “Sorry about that – here’s a flower, pencils and my signature to make it better. Don’t worry about the fact that the cute guinea pig is also a bit like a centipede.”

It happened twice, so go figure. Maybe the first ones were too much even for the AI.

Here, the AI was like: “Maybe you’d prefer this stretching creature with a funky keyboard and tiny smartphone.”

DALL·E vs. Midjouney

You’ve read this far, so here comes the NSFW thing.

Before inviting Saarikoski and Forsten to the discussion, Ossi Hanhinen was playing with the idea of illustrating his article with AI illustrations provided by DALL·E. DALL·E is an open AI system that, like Midjourney, produces images and art from natural-language descriptions.

He wrote Van Gogh style countryside with a group of developers discussing around a laptop and this is what we got.

So yes, we’re all familiar with the field meeting. Some are standing with a hotdog hand and explaining things, others are facepalming or drinking coffee, etc. But what is that person sitting on the right holding in their hand?

I know I’m not the only one seeing this. But, apparently, not everyone can – good for you and never mind.

“One of many differences between Midjourney and DALL·E is that Midjourney’s images are based on its own deep pool of curated images, while DALL·E browses the internet more freely”, Saarikoski says.

“So when you use Midjourney, you basically get less penises.”

This is just one nice example of the unintended, yet quite problematic, issues you might encounter when dealing with AI art.

Guidelines for AI art in Qvik’s blog and marketing

When writing instructions for AI algorithms, many also mention artists or styles they like – for instance Studio Ghibli or prases like art by artgerm and greg rutkowski and alphonse mucha.

“This is a bit sketchy, and I think that it’s important that Qvik doesn’t start mimicking specific artists and their unique styles in our material”, Saarikoski says.

So that’s rule number one. These are the other guidelines we’re going to start testing:

• Don’t mimic other artists.
• Keep it simple, no need to create whole worlds. Pick a few keywords from the blog and choose a theme that would fit.
• Illustrations should have a few key “eye-catchers” and their placement should be clear (golden rule, rule of thirds, in the middle, etc). 
• It’s okay to use patterns that fill the whole space, but they should be as seamless as possible.
• Steer away from realism, AI is not quite there yet. So no humans, animals or environments with realism in mind, as that usually stray into uncanny valley territory. Take a stylized approach instead.
• The color palette should be aligned with Qvik’s brand. We are not that strict about blog post illustrations, but the main colors should come from Qvik’s brand highlight colors. A black-and-white palette can also work.
• No raw images, all images should be edited in Photoshop to some degree. AI usually “prints out muddy colors”, so it’s a good idea to set at least the brightness, contrast and saturation in Photoshop.
• We use 16:9 ratio images in our blog.
• Obviously no NSFW material or any pictures straight out of uncanny valley.

Even with these instructions, it’s not going to be simple and polished out of the box. We agreed that Forsten and Saarikoski will help check and fix the images we produce with Midjourney, and the images will also get a round of Photoshop before use.

Our first blog post with AI cover was published this Monday. It’s Ossi Hanhinen’s What is automated UI testing and why should you do it?, and I hate to admit that to me the cover looks kinda nice.

I will now use an AI text generator to conclude this post

What better way to end a story about AI art than to let Copymatic.ai do it? The algorithm wrote four conclusions to choose from, and three of them said that we’re never going to use AI images again. That is not true, but I liked this one best.

“As we were crafting the guidelines to what kind of images we should use for our AI art blog cover images, we witnessed some horrible things. The AI generated some truly disturbing and graphic images that no one should ever have to see. We quickly decided that we would never use AI generated art for our cover images again. We hope that our experience can serve as a warning to others who might be considering using AI generated art for their own purposes.”

Copymatic.ai

The post AI art and the slippery slope to Uncanny Valley: Guinea pigs and something almost NSFW appeared first on Qvik.

Taking concrete actions for diversity, equity and inclusion is easier said than done. The problems are complex and, as Inklusiiv’s DEI consultant Maija Koponen highlights, achieving real DEI change means that everyone in the company needs to consider how their own behaviour and ways of working could be more inclusive.

To make DEI actions visible, we need to change people’s behaviour, and people have a tendency to resist everything new – so it is difficult.

Luckily we have help from Inklusiiv.

A discussion for everyone starts with why

Finland is not yet known for a lively social discussion about DEI matters. This means that people in general, and also people at Qvik, have varied levels of awareness of the topic – some are very familiar with it, while others are hearing about it for the first time.

“It’s common for companies to jump straight into training people on how to change and what to do differently”, Koponen says.

“But to get people truly involved, you have to start with raising awareness about the need for the changes, and answering the question “why?””

In company-wide discussions, it’s important to remember that people have different starting points. 

“For some Qvikies, the importance of DEI topics is self-evident, while others don’t yet understand what the fuss is about. So creating a message for everyone in the company is complicated”, says Qvik’s co-founder and Board member Tuukka Vauramo.

If the conversation is too advanced all the time, some people are left out of the discussion.

“It is very common for us people to pretend that we understand everything, even though we’re no longer following the discussion. When this happens, people usually fall silent and are afraid to ask questions”, Koponen says.

It’s a start for Qvik, but not from scratch

We have been following Inklusiiv’s work for a while, had our fair share of internal keynotes about DEI topics, and even hosted a webinar about inclusive design with Inklusiiv in February this year. We’ve learned that the more you educate yourself about this topic, the more you see there’s work to be done.

“Qvik is actually quite advanced in comparison to many other companies. Qvik is also a very hands-on, committed and agile company, so when there is an ambition to do something, you can move quite fast”, says Inklusiiv’s DEI consultant Yesmith Sánchez.

Introducing DEI to a company is complex and there are a myriad of things you need to take into account. Making progress in one area will probably not do much for DEI as a whole – it’s about having a holistic approach and engaging everyone in the organisation.

“We are really excited to continue this work, and I think this excitement comes from realizing the maturity level of this company. We are happy to see that Qvik can move forward to something more tangible than just awareness”, Sánchez says.

In a few weeks, the topics of our next workshop won’t let us off easy. We’re about to set our DEI roadmap timeline, define goals and accountability, map risks and draft our DEI action plan. After this, we will be more than happy to tell you more about our SWOT analysis and share our concrete next steps!

The post Getting real with diversity, equity and inclusion with help from Inklusiiv appeared first on Qvik.

Inclusive design starts with acknowledging your biases and privileges. In the keynotes, we got a deep dive into what this actually means.

One great point of view, which our senior product designer Jesse Ukkonen talks about in his article How do you belong? Diving deeper into diversity, equity and inclusion, is that DEI should be thought of as a skill that can be improved. The best way to improve is to educate yourself, widen your perspective and change your behaviour based on your new knowledge.

This recap gives four approaches to inclusive design. The section titles follow the talks given at the event.

Inclusive intersectional design

Our senior product designer Jesse Ukkonen makes it clear that inclusive and intersectional design is simply good design for everyone.

“The goal of inclusive design is not to design a product that fits every single person on the planet, but to recognise how diverse even a small set of people can be.”

Intersectionality means that people have more than one identity. This is why we cannot reduce individual users into a single category. As an example Ukkonen describes two kinds of athletes.

“A white Finnish male student in his 20s can be an athlete just like a dark-skinned British immigrant mother in their 40s can be an athlete – either of them might have a disability on top of that too.”

Ukkonen urges designers to think of inclusive intersectionality as an important tool that keeps you, for instance, from looking at athletes through a narrow lens that is obscured by stereotypes.

“There is no human being that would stay the same throughout their entire life. We all get older and sometimes we are broken, both physically and mentally. Good design takes these kinds of human factors into account.”

At the end of the keynote, our design lead Lassi Liikkanen, who also gave the welcome speech and introduction to the event, asked Ukkonen for general advice on how we should address these issues in a project as consultants.

“The good thing about being a designer and consultant is that I’m not there to be friends and agree on everything with the customer – it’s my job to raise these questions.”

Designing a humane future – including children’s best interest

Children are one user group that rarely gets attention in digital product design. In addition to poor usability, children are exposed to inappropriate content, fake news, unsafe contacts, privacy issues and stereotyped role models.

These are the issues that the international community of Designing for Children’s Rights addresses, for instance with their open source design guide.

“Usually our decisions are not aimed to do harm but humans are prone to multiple biases, which can produce biased data”, says Jonna Tötterman, co-founder of Designing for Children’s Rights.

According to UNICEF, roughly one in three internet users are under 18 years old. There are some laws and regulations that guide the digital product design process but, in the end, the companies that build the products also need to take responsibility. Taking children into account is also a wise business decision.

“Give any product to a toddler and you’ll see if it works.”

The default human – who is it hurting and what can we do

Sanna Rauhala, Design Anthropologist at Solita, looks at digital product design from the perspective of human behaviour and the human experience. As an example, she points out that many services have long been designed for an “average user” who has been male, most often a Caucasian one. This excludes a large part of the world’s population.

“Ignoring the social or physical context is not just bad inclusion practice, it’s bad design in general,” Rauhala says. “As a consequence, we might be creating something that is at best useless and at worst harmful.”

Rauhala also draws our attention to how we use words.

“Because things like words are so embedded in us, it is sometimes hard to understand that those words can have a different meaning to different people, and that they can have power over people in a way we can’t even imagine.”

In practice, Rauhala underlines the importance of thinking and listening: Who are you doing the product for? Who is it helping, who is it excluding, who can it hurt and, most of all, what is the impact?

DEI & Design – what we need to consider for inclusive design

As Inklusiiv’s DEI consultant Yesmith Sánchez says there seems to be no limit on how much you can learn about this topic.

“The more knowledgeable you become about the topic the more you realize you have to do, and sometimes people get overwhelmed”, Sánchez says.

Inklusiiv is an organisation and company that focuses on advancing DEI in working life and helps organizations to transform DEI into action.

“My advice is to go for one chunk at a time. That way you can see progress and you won’t get so frustrated.”

Sánchez points out that when you are not aware of diversity, equity and inclusion, you tend to overlook them. You’re not doing it because you’re a bad person or you don’t care about it. It’s simply because you do not know how to integrate it into our daily work – and that is an issue.

In your concrete actions, Sánchez advises to pay special attention to four common biases in digital service development:

• Confirmation bias
• Conformity bias
• Illusory correlation
• Availability heuristic

“We all have unconscious biases – it’s human nature and there’s no shame in having them. But what we actually do about them is important.”

To take things to an even more concrete level, Sánchez presents five steps to reduce bias in digital service and product development.

1. Have DEI as a core value in your service/product development
2. Learn about and identify unconscious biases
3. Have a diverse team
4.  Customer-centricity
5. Be mindful about the language, words, colours, pictures etc

Related reading & sources

There is a deep pool of literature and podcasts from which you can continue learning about this topic. Here’s something to get you started, curated for you by our one and only Jesse Ukkonen.

Books

• Mismatch, Kat Holmes
• Cross-Cultural Design, Senongo Akpem
• Invisible Women, Caroline Criado Perez
• Mother of Invention: How Good Ideas Get Ignored in an Economy Built for Men, Katrine Marçal

Articles and resources

• Inklusiiv’s DEI resource bank
• Microsoft & Inclusive design
• Accessibility, Usability, and Inclusion, W3C
• Belonging: A Conversation about Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion by Krys
• Getting Serious About Diversity: Enough Already with the Business Case
• The problem with that equity vs. equality graphic you’re using
• The digital rights of LGBTQ+ communities: Five steps towards an inclusive design process
• How tech companies can turn ‘commitments’ to diversity into action
• What exactly is a microaggression?

Podcasts

• The Inclusive AF Podcast
• The Argument – Are Workplace Diversity Programs Doing More Harm Than Good?
• Design Better Podcast – Google’s Annie Jean Baptiste: Building better products for everyone
• Airbnb’s Benjamin Evans on the power of inclusive design 

The post Four approaches to Inclusive Design – how to add diversity, equity and inclusion to your day-to-day appeared first on Qvik.

Applying for a job is a lot of work in itself, and can feel especially difficult when starting your career.

Mikael Meinander is an Android developer who already had a few years of experience under his belt before arriving at Qvik. I am Minna Nurminen, a junior designer at Qvik and finishing my studies in Digital Design at Metropolia.

We started at Qvik on the same day – April 19th, 2021. How did we end up here and, more importantly, why?

“Qvik has done a tremendous job when it comes to design and tech: winning awards and creating value for well-known clients. I wanted to work with the greatest apps and the best developers, and Qvik is exactly that”, Mikael says.

Qvik is known for quality. But it’s also known for its great culture and letting people have a say in how, when and on what they work. This flexibility and culture was the main attraction for me.

“On the topic of culture: I knew some really nice people who work at Qvik and wanted to follow in their footsteps. I was also impressed by the way people were sharing job openings on LinkedIn”, Mikael says. “Qvikies were always liking and sharing the posts like ‘come here, this is the best place to work’. To me, that speaks for itself.”

I also knew some people who worked at Qvik and knew their values and backgrounds and how much they had enjoyed working at Qvik. I didn’t need to think twice when they offered me a job.

You can apply for a job at Qvik via our Careers page, but sometimes other channels, such as LinkedIn, work just as well.

My first contact was a LinkedIn message to Matias Pietilä, who was Head of Design at the time. I asked if Qvik had any junior positions open. He encouraged me to send an open application to Talent Acquisition, and we immediately set up an interview for next week!

The interviews – Yes, no, maybe. I don’t know. Can you repeat the question?

After submitting an application or being contacted by one of our Talent Acquisition people, a potential applicant is invited to a culture talk where the main goal is to figure out if Qvik and the applicant dance to the same rhythm.

My talk was very relaxed, with the usual job interview questions, but I remember a few industry-related curveballs. I didn’t mind being challenged though, and I got feedback right on the spot, which was really nice.

“Qvik’s Technical Recruiter Jari Sandström knew me already, and we simply had a 1-on-1 about what I would be doing at Qvik and what my thoughts were on the company. Spoiler alert: they were all good”, Mikael says.

After a successful culture talk, the applicant is given an assignment related to their craft. The amount of time given to do the assignment can vary, and they are then invited to a tech/design talk to present their results.

“I was given a week to do a mobile app with whatever technology I preferred. I chose Kotlin and Android studio,” Mikael says.

Mine was a UX assignment and I was allowed to take as much time as I wanted. I designed a flight booking system with Figma. No visuals involved, just wireframes.

“There were four people with different backgrounds at my tech talk. And they asked a lot of questions. I got really good feedback on what I did well and what I should improve on”, Mikael says.

“They challenged me, asking me to justify my choices and why I had done what I did. I think the talk would have been useful even if I wouldn’t have gotten the job, as it helped me in my dev career anyway.”

I was asked to present my work like I would to a client. Luckily I was prepared for that. I got comments about my design and presentation skills right on the spot, and they tested the reasons for my choices.

We talked a lot about why I had done this and that, and not so much about what I had actually designed. Justifying your design choices is key, and it’s also beneficial to your development. I also got good feedback on using data to back me up and really sell the design.

Getting hired is a lot about culture fit, but it’s obviously about competence as well

“Just doing OK at school and doing the bare minimum is not enough. You need to be into coding and also do some in your free time. Check out what other devs are doing and what is new in your field. Learn and be open minded”, Mikael says.

“For the six months before I got the message from Jari, I had been practising with a lot of new technologies in my free time. I believe that was the main thing that helped me get the job.”

You don’t need a specific background but are expected to be a good teammate and know what you are doing. You don’t need to know everything, but should be willing to learn.

What I like about Qvik is that, even though personal development is expected, nobody pressures you. Plus you don’t need to do it in your free time because you have a certain amount of hours per week that you can use for educating yourself.

The call – So no one told you life was gonna be this way

The recruitment processes for Mikael and I only took a few weeks, from the first message on LinkedIn to getting “the call”.

“Jari contacted me a few days after the tech talk and we had a recap of the recruitment over the phone. The interviewers were super happy that I had applied and were so nice and supportive. It left me with such a good feeling. Best way to end the recruitment.”

I remember exchanging some emails after the interview. Soon Katriina Manneri (now on maternity leave) from the Talent Acquisition team told me that she has some good news for me and asked if it would be okay to call. Getting an offer from Qvik felt awesome.

All in all, the recruitment process was really smooth and Qvik was so flexible with everything. I could choose when to start and could take some time off in the summer.

We’re here – Where everybody knows your name, and they’re always glad you came

At Qvik, we always introduce and welcome our newcomers at our Friday-morning Qweekly meeting for the whole company.

“A few weeks after we were introduced, there was a summer outing for the whole company. People I had never met before came to me like “Hey, you’re Mikael from Jätkäsaari!” People actually made an effort to remember me, and I appreciate that”, Mikael says.

We spend a huge amount of our lives at work and I think it’s really important that we enjoy it. Even as a junior, I feel like I’m treated like a peer at Qvik, and the environment is secure enough for me to voice my opinions.

The post What’s it like getting a job at Qvik? appeared first on Qvik.

At Qvik, developers are encouraged to learn more about their areas of interest – be it back-end, frontend, cloud infra, DevOps, you name it. For instance, if there are any certifications (GCP, AWS, Scrum, etc.) you would like to obtain, Qvik will support you with that and cover the fees.

It’s also safe to say that Qvik is a flexible employer when it comes to different life situations and needs.

For instance, I have my home and family in England and consider Helsinki more like my second home – and Qvik is fine with it. Also, Olli Paakkunainen from our back-end team recently moved to South Korea, and this was not an issue.

What happens in our recruitment process?

Our recruitment process is fairly straightforward. It’s usually done in two meetings. The first time around, we talk culture with the potential candidate. After that, the candidate is given the choices to either do an assignment (coding/design) to work on or show us a hobby/personal project to check out.

We expect the hobby or personal projects to be similar or more complex if the candidate chooses the latter option.

The purpose of the assignment is to evaluate the candidate’s practical skills. Upon submission of the assignment we hold a second meeting, which is mostly technical.

We discuss the solution to the assignment along with the candidate’s other relevant skills and theoretical knowledge. If the technical meeting goes well, we usually make an offer within a day or two.

Read the experiences of our own Kuisma Joentakanen, recently recruited to our back-end team.

1. Tell us about yourself.

My name is Kuisma and I work as a Software Engineer for Qvik. I don’t like siskonmakkarakeitto (Finnish soup with strange sausages) and Samuli Edelmann (Finnish singer/actor).

In my free time, I like to swim, bowl, sing (especially hymns and old Finnish schlagers), do volunteer work for my local churches, enjoy beer and whiskey. I also enjoy taking long walks late in the evening. I haven’t found enough time for reading lately, but I would like to change that!

I think I’m the only one responsible for how my career turns out and how I will improve and get challenged.

I welcomed the change and I was not afraid at all, even though we had a baby coming and we also have a mortgage to pay till the day we die.

2. What was the recruitment assignment like? How did you feel about it?

I was given the chance to either do the assignment or provide my own project’s source code instead. I selected the latter.

I was happy that my code was thoroughly reviewed and I got a lot of questions on why I did this and that, and what might have been a better way to implement certain things.

The technical interview was sheer torture (piinapenkki), the Qvikies were really twisting my thumbs!

3. What is your impression about Qvik?

The people seem nice and relaxed. The company has this small-company feeling, in a good way. The people you see around are not just someone from another division that you will never see again.

Interested?

Well we’d love to hear from you, so apply here! Or if you want to know more about how we run our back-end at Qvik, here’s some further reading.

• What back-end Qvikies value about their teammates
• Developer stories of Christophe and Robert
• Story of Qvik’s back-end team
• What makes a good mobile backend? Let’s ask the frontend developers.

Illustration: Niina Nissinen

The post Behind the scenes of back-end recruitment at Qvik appeared first on Qvik.

After years of coffee break talk, it’s finally here: Qvik’s very own podcast, Naming Things. The first episode is now out for you to listen through a variety of podcast services.

As you would have it, the most difficult part about making the podcast was thinking of a name. Many thanks to everyone who contributed over Qvik’s Slack channel!

In the first episode of Naming Things, we discuss Flutter 2’s new features with our software developers. The following episodes will unleash our designers and other experts, not to mention a roster of fascinating guest speakers.

The one in which software developers talk about Flutter’s new features.

Our first episode is hosted by Qvik’s Jari Sandström, who recently evolved from software developer to technical recruiter. Jari bolstered the episode’s lineup with Alex Lindroos—mobile developer at Codemate by day, CS:GO tournament organizer with Kanaliiga by night.

Qvik’s Flutter expertise is represented by Eralp Karaduman—a software developer with a staggering diversity of know-how on everything from Flutter and React Native to pixel art, podcast production and who knows what else!

• What is Flutter and how does it compare to the competition, React Native?
• Flutter Engage 2021. Did Flutter’s new features live up to our expectations?
• What is the Kanaliiga and how can I get in on the fun?

This is what we’ll be talking about in our first episode of Naming Things.

Naming things is available in  Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts and other major podcast services.

The post Naming Things’ First Episode Tackles Kanaliiga and Flutter Engage 2021 appeared first on Qvik.

As we learned in 2020, the coronavirus pandemic proved the opposite to be true. In fact, the latest mobile market insights demonstrate that the pandemic sped up the transition to a mobile-first world, advancing it by 2 or 3 years in just 12 months.

Consumers are now actively looking for new mobile offerings to cater for their needs to shop, do business, manage their personal finances, improve their health and be entertained.

Data source: State of Mobile 2021, App Annie (2021)

Qvik has been developing mobile applications since 2008, and we have seen the development of the mobile market from the appearance of the first applications in the app stores. Today, we see that the era of mobile apps is nothing but over.

In this blog post, we dig a little deeper and look at what customers are looking for and what every company should know about their changing expectations. What industries are we expecting to bloom in the mobile-first world in the coming years? Who will be the winners in the Mobile-First World?

Consumers know what they want, and it’s 4 stars or more

Speeding towards the mobile-first world does not mean customers are ready to adopt just any new digital service. Studies show that users’ expectations towards digital services are higher than ever.

Today, customers expect the same user experience from their banking app than from the coolest new social media or food delivery app. This means that, in the mobile market, you’re not competing just against other companies in your own field. The experience provided by your app is in fact being measured against every single app consumers are using.

And this is when your app rating and reviews become more important than you think. In a recent study by Apptentive, consumers were clear: the lower the star rating, the less likely they’d be to download the app in the first place.

Source: Screenshot from Apptentive’s Mobile App Ratings and Reviews: Where to Start and How to Win guide.

When your company has made a strategic decision to invest in developing a mobile app, you don’t want to ruin the returns with something as simple as bad reviews.

But if you are in this situation right now, don’t worry. There are plenty of ways to improve your ratings – and we at Qvik are here to help your mobile business bloom.

What kind of apps are trending now?

In addition to highlighting the growth of user expectations, it is also interesting to see which sectors have been the winners of the pandemic – and who are going to be the winners in the mobile-first era.

If we count out games and social media, we can see significant growth in four industries in particular: business, finance, retail and health & fitness apps.

Data source: State of Mobile 2021, App Annie (2021)

In our line of business, though, it’s not only important to know what the current state of mobile is, but also what lies ahead.

What do we expect to see in the future?

In the Nordic market, there are very few B2C industries that we expect not to see strong growth in mobile: the mobile market is still far from mature and we expect to see plenty of new mobile success stories in various industries.

The question is: What factors and progressions should businesses take into consideration when planning their mobile strategies?

At Qvik, we forecast three clear future trends. First of all, the mobile device is becoming an even more important tool in our everyday lives: your phone is practically a remote control for everything around you. You can use it to control your home electronics or your car, or for getting physical access to services.

“This is a trend that has huge potential, and we only expect to see more of these solutions hit the market”, says Qvik’s CEO Lari Tuominen.

Another thing we see is that mobile will have an even more important role in commerce.

“In addition to the growth we’re seeing in retail apps, mobile will have an even more important part to play in all future transactions. The growing number of digital payment methods and the phone’s bigger role in confirming transactions will accelerate this development”, Tuominen continues.

The third thing we predict is that the division between web and mobile will become even more blurred.

“I’m certain we’ll see more brilliant PWA and other hybrid solutions that provide users with more seamless digital experiences”, Tuominen concludes.

Building mobile success stories and navigating your business in the middle of emerging technologies and growing user expectations isn’t the easiest job to do. And that’s why we are here. Our job is to keep our customers up to date about trends and the development of mobile technologies.

Don’t hesitate to contact us whether it’s about understanding user expectations, hacking your app ratings or building entirely new mobile offerings.

The post Mobile Market Insights Don’t Lie: Mobile Is Stayin’ Alive. appeared first on Qvik.