What has changed from 2020 to 2024?

Since this guide was first published in 2020, few things have changed. Progressive web apps have been dealt a serious blow by Apple which temporarily announced discontinuing support for WPA, and then reversed its opinion. The cross-platform technology stack has solidified. Today React Native (RN) and Flutter are the dominant choices, and seem equally popular. Xamarin is gone for good and Cordova is unpopular. Kotlin Multiplatform has slowly emerged as one alternative RN and Flutter.

Starting from web

When starting out, the first mobile app technology choice is between web apps and native apps. Overall, solutions such as Google G Suite demonstrate the viability and feasibility of web apps for providing critical productivity solutions.

Web apps became more competitive with Progressive Web Apps, or PWAs. PWAs can provide great, fast user experiences and a strong feeling of “a native app.” For instance, the Pinterest PWA launched in 2017 achieved numerous things: it doubled weekly active users, tripled session length, quadrupled the reach of individual Pins and made several technical breakthroughs. Web apps have limitations, however, particularly on iOS platforms, and thus cannot compete with native apps across all domains.

Going native is more than a single choice between web and native. There are at least three alternative routes for developing a native app: true natives, cross-platform, and hybrid. Each branch involves a number of further variations. We will now explore these and provide our opinions on which factors favour each variant.  

True native applications in focus

When talking about native apps, we refer to applications written fully using the proprietary languages and software development kits, namely Xcode (for iOS) and Android Studio. Their strongest selling point is unlimited control over the app and the best opportunities to utilize all the latest features of the operating system and third-party APIs.

Smooth and flashy animations are a hallmark of a native app UI. They are hard to match with other techniques. Here are some other benefits of native applications: 

• Push notifications
• Accurate positioning and geofencing
• Biometric authentication
• Bluetooth
• App-to-app integrations
• NFC and mobile wallet access
• Great overall performance

With true native apps, everything is divided: there are always separate Android and iOS development tracks. Although some applications might only exist on a single platform, by looking at the global market shares for iOS and Android (28% vs. 72% respectively) it is easy to understand that you can’t neglect either platform if you are trying to address the full audience. Only a company-internal app could succeed on a single platform if all employees are locked into it. On the other hand, there are luckily only two platforms left as Symbian, Windows, and Samsung’s proprietary platforms have vanished.

Paying the double price

The biggest implication of true native development is that you have to do everything twice: design, develop, deploy, and manage. In reality, two development tracks don’t double the effort, since there is overlap in, for example, back-end work and design.

The total bill can easily rack up, however. It is also not unheard of to see true native tracks developing at different paces, not only due to the platform’s evolution but also because the development of some features might take up different amounts of time for different platforms.

True native apps also have a few other drawbacks. The biggest hindrances are the application update and associated store review processes that every update has to go through. This slows down the overall update process. Secondly, most businesses have already developed web-based capabilities and content, which you can’t ignore when designing and maintaining the apps.

At Qvik, we’ve had good experiences developing native applications for multiple customers over the years. For example, in security and performance critical online banking, the natural mobile app technology choice has been native.

Cross-platform under the lens

The drawbacks of true native development can be partially mitigated by cross-platform solutions. Cross-platform frameworks enable you to develop iOS and Android applications on a single development track. React Native from Facebook and Flutter from Google are the prominent solutions in this category. Kotlin Multiplatform  is also a known solution for cross-platform development.

Based on the 2023 Stack Overflow developer survey, Flutter and React Native are equally popular technology choices (9.2% vs. 9.1%, respectively). Survey respondents also indicated very similar levels of interest in continuing with these technologies in the future.

The key idea is that cross-platform software development can mostly work with a single codebase or “thread,” with the exception of specific “true native” elements that still live inside a different thread. However, by taking as much code out from the native thread as possible, you can reduce repeat work. The expected gains largely depend on the application domain, but this can be a substantial advantage for many media or productivity apps.

Cross-platform development doesn’t come without its cons, however. First, the reliance on a framework means that development becomes dependent on the framework’s development in addition to the operating system’s. This increases the product’s overall complexity, possibly slowing development in other ways, such as making bug fixes more tedious. 

Frameworks do not support all native platform features, at least not immediately upon release. Second, you can’t satisfy all application needs by unifying development as there is always some “static” content that still needs to be managed. This brings us to hybrid solutions.

Hybrid solutions at a glance

The main idea of all hybrid applications is to wrap up parts of a (mobile) website and present them inside an app. The common technical term for this approach is webview.  A hybrid approach should reduce development and content creation needs radically.

Hybrids initially emerged as a shortcut for entering the application business with minimal investment in building real apps. Symbian and Windows apps were still relevant at the time and the entry costs were high. However, the benefits of “native-wrapped” web apps were thin, and the user experience with hybrids was not as convincing as with true native apps. 

The amount of variation in the hybrid space is currently noticeable. You can first choose between building a cross-platform hybrid app or a native hybrid app. This builds on the earlier distinction between these two development approaches. The second question is how much web components (logic, UI elements, content) can be adapted to the application.

At Qvik, we talk about “thin natives” and “heavy natives”, referring to the relative proportion of native components in the application as illustrated in the Table below.

The thinner the application, the more features the web service needs to provide to help run the native app. This is controversial because the expected savings from re-using web content are somewhat diminished by increased demands in web development. The amount of additional work depends on the complexity of the service. At the other end, the fat native app can benefit more from the synergies offered by cross-platform development. 

One case we have been heavily involved with concerns the Tallink & SiljaLine cruise booking and management application. This award-winning, popular and highly rated application (4.5 stars out of five) is an example of thin hybrid technology. It includes only three native views and more than a hundred webviews. The native parts handle navigation and status, and the rest of the app comes from several web services. The success of this approach speaks for the potential in hybrid, cross-platform development.  

Navigating the decision tree

If you count the end nodes for the different branches of mobile app technology choices, you find at least six alternatives. This is counting all true natives as one and ignoring the continuum of options between thin and fat hybrid breeds. How do you decide which path to take?

We at Qvik have been guiding some listed Finnish companies on their app development renewal journeys over the years. While the specifics and outcomes of the cases are different, we have also noted some interesting similarities.

When giving out tailored guidance, we propose that you can base your choices on the following:

1. Are web features enough for you, can you live with mediocre UX?
   → If yes, Choose a web app
   If not
2. How willing and able are you to utilize web components?
   → If not at all, Choose a true native or cross-platform
   Otherwise
3. How do you want to develop the hybrid app? Native or cross-platform, thin or heavy?
4. If you are leaning towards cross-platform, finally choose the cross-platform framework, Flutter or React Native

The choice is not easy. We have systematically explored the consequences of the mobile app technology choices with our clients in terms of expected investment, time-to-market, available talent, risks, and UX potential.  Each of these factors will have a different weight in different business domains. 

For instance, if your current app is built on outdated technology, time-to-market will be more important as a fast replacement is needed. If you have chosen to fully in-house your development resources, you need to consider their capabilities for working with a specific technology: will it require outside help or re-training – and are those external resources available? 

Somewhat to our surprise, we have found ourselves recommending React Native after all but one of these reviews. We have justified this recommendation based on:

• a single language & codebase 
• synergy with web development expertise & tools
• a fast development cycle
• simplified lifecycle methods 
• opportunity to push updates without an app review

On the other hand, all of these cases have had strong web development capability in-house to build on. But every case is unique, and there are more variables in play than I can list here. The recommendation for your service’s mobile app technology might differ, should any of the variables change.

Contact us if your organization needs more insight on choosing the right mobile app technology for your purposes – we’d be happy to chat. If you’d like to accelerate your app’s road to consumer and commercial success by other means and with minimal investment, check out our Mobile app success package.

This article has been composed with input from multiple Qvik experts, most recently Andrei Sadovnicov and Jani Mikkonen – thanks for all involved!

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After Google developed the transformer technology in 2017, generative AI has steadily gained ground in multiple industries. Generative AI is capable of learning and thus producing prompt-based text and images of rapidly improving quality.

With generative AI-based productivity tools such as ChatGPT and Midjourney, companies have started to ponder the technology’s future effects on their business.

In the realm of digital products and services, generative AI is currently causing a shift in interaction design. “Intentfaces” are replacing traditional interfaces, making natural language the primary mode of exchange with digital products. This replaces the need for conventional methods that rely on buttons, filters, and machine-optimized search processes.

In the future, designing user experiences will increasingly focus on seamlessly matching user intent. The ongoing evolution has the potential to make our interaction with technology more natural, resembling our everyday communication and relations.

How to successfully integrate generative AI into your business

Successfully adopting AI across your organization has multiple benefits. According to AI Bootcamp, an AI-ready culture enhances performance, accelerates innovation, and asserts advantage with data-driven decision-making. Yet, adopting AI as part of your existing organization is not something you should approach lightly. 

Here is a list of recommended first steps for your organization in embracing the possibilities provided by generative AI. These steps highlight responsibility, transparency, leadership, and a systematic approach.

1. Get educated and find motivation

Before you make your AI debut, it pays off to do some research. Read books and articles, take courses, and try it out. You must be trained to use the current versions of generative AI responsibly. Finding personal motivation will also help you maintain your AI understanding – in rapidly developing technology, best practices change weekly. 

2. Focus on real problems and start small

When you’re getting familiar with generative AI, it’s tempting to start thinking that it will solve all your problems. AI has flaws, so we guarantee that rushing into anything will only make your business suffer. Instead of employing AI to do all possible tasks, find minor problems that AI could solve and do internal testing before implementing it in customer-facing projects. Realistic use cases will yield successful outcomes and help your team hone their skills. Only once you master simple tasks can you start experimenting with augmenting human abilities.

3. Find the right tools, platforms, and partners

The internet is flooded with AI-based apps, tools, and platforms of variable quality. These tools have in common that most of them come with associated costs. Knowing the problems you’ll try to solve with generative AI will make gathering your toolbox much easier. In the beginning, you should also rely on a trusted partner to guide you through opportunities and build a realistic AI roadmap for your company.

4. Create an AI-ready culture

The AI Bootcamp defines an AI-ready culture as one where:

• Employees embrace AI as an opportunity rather than a threat
• There’s a willingness to incorporate AI across business functions
• People are comfortable collaborating with AI systems as partners
• The focus is on augmenting, rather than replacing, human abilities
• Data-driven executive decisions and workflows exist

To create an AI-ready culture, be transparent about your AI vision and strategy. Provide training and learning opportunities, develop dedicated roles for AI, incentivize finding use cases for the new technology, and stay in touch by surveying your employees. Speaking about AI publicly and creating frameworks and policies for its use lets your employees and customers know what you’re doing. Businesses communicating boundaries and guidelines for AI use will avoid unethical use, lapsed security, and mangled processes.

5. Learn prompt engineering

Prompt engineering is the basis for almost any kind of tool in the productivity space – hence, it’s a valuable skill for any professional in the future workforce. Prompts are the essence of generative AI and give your tool the context, goals, and background to create what you’re asking for. Have you ever made your AI ask you questions about the problem you’re trying to solve? What type of expert roles have you given your AI? The more you learn about prompts, the better the results you’ll get.

Generative AI bias highlights the importance of a systematic approach

AI is developed and trained by humans, so it reflects our biases. For example, images containing people created by AI often include only beautiful individuals – since human users prefer them. Inclinations like this eventually lead to diminished diversity and representation.

Some choices the AI makes are also impossible to understand. AI-generated images can be creepy or make no sense, with little known understanding of why this happens. Unexpected or unreasonable outcomes are common. 

Although using AI will train it further, human bias is impossible to completely eliminate, so it’s important to have educated guidelines on using the tools. Generative AI has great promise, but it’s not a silver bullet.

A Practical Guide to Generative AI in Design, by Qvik – Generative AI is a game-changer for designers, making workflows smoother, enhancing creativity, and transforming how we connect with people. Qvik offers a hands-on POC (Proof of Concept) to explore generative AI tools. The POC is designed to be a chance to experience the difference these tools can make for you. Let’s envision a future where efficient design helps us overcome challenges and open new frontiers. Let’s explore the opportunities provided by the AI technology together!

Sources

Juha Falck: AI and human re-evolution
(Keynote presentation at Qvik’s event: GEN AI Revolution: Transforming digital interaction on February 29, 2024)

Jaana Hautala: Own your AI content: detecting bias in gen AI for responsible use
(Keynote presentation at Qvik’s event: GEN AI Revolution: Transforming digital interaction on February 29, 2024)

Joni Juup: GenAI-driven paradigm shift in UX
(Keynote presentation at Qvik’s event: GEN AI Revolution: Transforming digital interaction on February 29, 2024)

Artificial Intelligence

Generative Artificial Intelligence

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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!

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Only one in ten prefers a fixed-term subscription, and only 15% of Finns prefer to pay for mobile services with one-time payments.

So far, subscription-based business models have been most common in entertainment and educational apps. As most Finns are willing to use a subscription-based payment method but only have one to three active subscriptions, other industries too have a great opportunity to leverage the subscription economy.

Suunto Sports Tracker Premium got a 68% increase in premium users in a few months, and 70% of the new users continued after the free trial

One great example of a well-executed subscription-based application is our client Suunto’s Sports Tracker Premium. Sports Tracker was one of the first mobile sports trackers and has hundreds of thousands of active users each month, with over 700,000 users just in Finland.

Suunto acquired Sports Tracker in 2015. To change the app from a money sink to a viable business, they started building a subscription-based premium model around it in November last year.

The design work for Sports Tracker Premium is done by Qvik’s Minna Nurminen and Oona Lindqvist. In the beginning, the team consisted of Suunto’s product owner Antti Sorvari, Nurminen and Lindqvist, Qvik developers Kate Khudzhamkulova and Joel Pöllänen, and one developer from Vincit.

The work started with surveys and benchmarking and ended with a ROI of over €110,000/month

As Suunto wanted to keep Sports Tracker partially free, the team needed to strike a perfect balance between keeping the app viable and usable for everyone and still giving enough value for premium users so they would pay for it.

The first step was to find out how interested Sports Tracker users would be in certain content and features that the team already knew were popular and possible to deliver.

“Then we asked if the users would be willing to pay for that content, and if so, how much. In addition, we asked background questions to get an understanding of what types of users would be willing to pay”, says Qvik’s product designer Minna Nurminen, who had a crucial role in the concept, validation and design work of Sports Tracker Premium.

Benchmarking and user surveys confirmed the existence of a market and an audience for Sports Tracker Premium.

“Our work in defining user personas and value propositions helped us stay focused on the user’s needs. Together with the survey results and user data, this helped us decide what features to include in the premium subscription.​”

Minna Nurminen, Product Designer from Qvik

As stated in the subheader, this story has a happy ending: users see the value of Sports Tracker Premium, are willing to subscribe, and the premium feature produced €110,000 in revenue to Suunto already in May 2023. Since then, the amount of subscribers has increased steadily and, naturally, so has the revenue.

Get ready to improve acceptance rates with network tokenisation

When we studied the reasons why Finns cancel their subscriptions, we found that almost a fifth (18%) stopped using a service simply because the service period ended and they did not renew the subscription – so they didn’t even actively decide to cancel. 

One way to make it easier for the user to continue a subscription is to use network tokenisation in the payment flow. Google Pay and Apple Pay already rely on network tokenisation, and soon, it will be available for all card payments.

“The health and prosperity of a merchant’s business are closely tied to the authorisation rates of payment cards. When the card authorisation rate is higher, there is an increased probability of repeat customer transactions, leading to higher business revenue”

Sami Nurmi, Payment Specialist from Qvik

With the growing adoption of subscription-based business models, the significance of a secure and seamless payment solution for handling recurring transactions cannot be emphasised enough. Network tokenisation plays a vital role in this, as it substitutes sensitive card information with unique tokens.

These token values safeguard cardholder details and maintain the capability to execute transactions even if the physical card is lost, blocked, or expired. Essentially, this incorporates a card-updater functionality and protects recurring payments.

This article is written based on Qvik’s and Paytrail’s event The subscription revolution: Exploring the future of digital business. Paytrail offers a mobile payment SDK that supports recurring payments through payment card tokenisation. The technical implementation of Paytrail’s mobile payment SDK is done by Qvik’s developers.

Download Qvik Insights report of the most attractive business models for mobile apps and digital services.

Building mobile business on facts

We studied how the Finns want to pay in applications, how willing they are to pay for applications, and what expectations they have for customer service and signing in to applications.

Find out how Finns use digital services.

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If you wish to learn more about how network tokenisation would benefit your business, feel free to contact our advisory team’s Mikko Vahter or Sami Nurmi.

Sami Nurmi

Senior Consultant, Payment Solutions

sami.nurmi@qvik.com

Mikko Vahter

Advisory & Payments

+358408094505mikko.vahter@qvik.com

The post Lessons from Suunto Sports Tracker Premium: How to build the best subscription-based model for your business appeared first on Qvik.

“One of Visa’s primary strategies is tokenization, which involves replacing sensitive payment information with a unique code or token used to complete transactions”, says Thomas Holt Nielsen, Head of Visa’s Risk and Identity, Issuer & Acceptance Solutions in the Nordics and Baltics.

“This ensures that customer data is kept safe from fraudsters while still enabling fast and convenient payments.”

Visa has been leading the charge in network tokenization and digital authentication, and its program and frameworks are in use by companies like MobilePay, Vipps and Mercedes-Benz. While security is the top priority for all merchants, tokenization also opens other possibilities, like maintaining updated payment information when cards expire.

“One of our key initiatives at Visa is Click to Pay. Click to Pay is a global standard for e-commerce and enables secure and convenient consumer payments based on card tokenization – we want it to be as good as contactless face-to-face payments (Tap To Pay)”, Holt Nielsen says.

How to get a digital solution on par with face-to-face transactions?

In today’s digital age, security is a primary concern for all businesses, especially for those operating in the eCommerce space. As more and more transactions are conducted online, the risk of fraud and unauthorized access to sensitive data has become a serious issue.

To combat this, businesses need to implement robust authentication frameworks that can ensure secure access and transactions.

Visa’s Cloud Token Framework is a holistic approach featuring a token that is binded to the consumers device (trusted device) and offers an innovative solution to this problem. It is designed to provide secure authentication for digital transactions by linking the user’s device to their card, including the use of biometrics enabled by FIDO (Fast Identity Online). This means that a user account can only be accessed with a specific device, effectively preventing unauthorized access.

Click to Pay and Cloud Token Framework are game changers when it comes to online shopping with debit or credit cards.

“The combination of Click to Pay and Cloud Token Framework offers unparalleled convenience and ease of use for customers. With the ability to complete transactions with just a single click, Click To Pay makes the checkout process quick and effortless”, says Qvik’s payment expert Sami Nurmi.

“Customers no longer need to waste time filling out long forms or repeatedly entering payment information. With Click to Pay, they can enjoy a streamlined checkout experience, saving them time and effort.”

The Digital Wallet Operator (DWO) or the merchant is responsible for the implementation of the Cloud Token Framework. The DWO is a service provider that manages the user’s digital wallet and facilitates transactions between the user and the merchant. The Cloud Token Framework is an essential component of the DWO’s services, as it provides secure and reliable authentication.

Digital authentication provides liability protection to merchants similarly to 3DS (3D Secure). The Visa Ready Program recognizes this and has adopted the Cloud Token Framework into the program, which identifies and supports innovative payment solutions that meet Visa’s security and usability requirements.

Recap

In conclusion, the Cloud Token Framework is an innovative solution that offers secure authentication for digital transactions. It provides a reliable and convenient way to ensure that only the user’s device can access their account, preventing unauthorized access and reducing the risk of fraud.

As eCommerce evolves, the Cloud Token Framework is set to become an essential component of the digital wallet and merchant app ecosystem, providing a robust security solution for all stakeholders involved. So:

1. Get tokenized
2. Bind the token to the device with Visa Cloud Token Framework
3. Use FIDO for biometrics

This article is based on the event Improving your digital business with advanced CX. The great speakers at the event were Thomas Holt Nielsen from Visa, Teemu Karenius from Yonoton, Juhana Schulman from Terveystalo and Mikko Sievänen from Mint of Finland. The event was hosted at Qvik’s office on March 22, 2023.

The post Make use of Visa’s advanced online card payment solutions and commitment to user experience appeared first on Qvik.

When Virta was founded in 2013, the number of electric vehicles in Finland was modest. Of all the 118,000 cars registered that year, only 60 were electric, and by the end of the year, there were only a total of 169 electric vehicles in Finland.

“In theory, even if we had a 100 percent market share, we would only have had 169 customers – and even if EVs would have been ten times as popular, it would still not have been big.”

Jussi Ahtikari, Chief Technology Officer at Virta

Ahtikari joined the company in the summer of 2014 and has led the development of Virta’s EV charging platform since.

“In spite of the public discussion and lack of faith, we believed in growth. Before the end of 2014, we had published the first commercial version and showed our investors that we were onto something.”

Today, the Powered by Virta EV charging platform and network covers 75,000 chargers in 35 countries and 61 percent of Europe’s public charging infrastructure. More than a thousand organizations in the retail, hotel, parking, real estate and energy industries use Virta’s platform.

In 2023, Financial Times included Virta on the Europe’s 1,000 Fastest Growing Companies list for the fourth time in a row.

Creating a platform business that combines hardware and software

Back in 2013, charging EVs was mostly free as many companies were focused on selling the hardware. The EV charging business model was that customers could buy a card granting unlimited access to charging stations or a physical key to the charger, and then charge their cars limitlessly. Different cities had their own charging stations each with their own peculiarities, and charging stations were becoming isolated.

In the beginning, Virta made three right decisions. First of all, they decided to create a business that scales with digital services. Secondly, they started to design a more universal cloud-based platform instead of building an IT system that would only work for a specific company. And thirdly, they immediately started to plan a commercial model for EV charging.

“Our idea is that the driver doesn’t have to care about who owns the charging station if it’s a part of Virta’s platform. As a driver, you get access to all stations that are connected, and you can use them with an app”, Ahtikari says.

“We were not thinking about how to sell electricity to car owners. Instead, we were focusing on how to get the drivers to download our app and get them to subscribe.”

EV charging poles come in various shapes and sizes – in fact, there are more than 400 different models of chargers. Some have buttons, some have lids, and they all function – or don’t – according to their own logic.

“The hardware is constantly failing, and that is challenging when you want to create a great digital experience but also a great real-world experience”, Ahtikari says.

Testing every scenario is next to impossible and if something goes wrong, you’ll have a hard time guessing what it was and explaining that to the user.

“What we have noticed is that you simply have to learn how to live in an imperfect world and do your best with what you’ve got.”

Finding the best global business model and then, a better one

While electricity sales are local, digital services are global. And in the platform business, the big fish eat the little ones. These two truths led Virta to reach for the global market.

“If we had stayed local, someone else would have done it and overshadowed us.”

The global business started with Virta tailoring their product to local electricity companies and EV charging operators all over Europe, saying yes to everyone’s needs and suggestions.

“Our competitors were less flexible. We were making the service for our partners and the apps had the logo of the local energy company instead of Virta.”

While establishing their foothold in the global market, Virta provided solutions to the local companies and helped them grow. But as Virta had just one platform in the cloud, the amount of tailored features eventually got too big.

“It’s not possible to create and maintain 1,000 different tailored versions of your product, so we renewed our strategy to scale in a big way.”

Ahtikari explains that, instead of big electricity companies, Virta started to look for other market segments, such as hotels and stores. These market segments were mainly focusing on something else than EV charging and were happy to get an untailored, simple service – a complete solution.

With this change of direction, Virta’s product development also changed. They now had to come up with different, smart ways to automate and deliver the products. But it enabled big growth.

“In the platform business, it’s always about getting the crowds to use your service, and now the benefits are starting to show.”

Key lessons from Virta’s journey

1. Don’t build what you can buy
2. Have a big vision, but focus on the next small step
3. Create an environment where it is OK to fail and make mistakes
4. Choose your battles

Join Qvik’s next Digital Product meetup?

This article is based on Qvik’s Digital Product Meetup held on May 4. The DiP meetups are a place for product managers, product owners and people in product management to discuss and learn about relevant themes.

The post Virta built a successful platform business and went global – we can all learn from that 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

The post The best app store rating hacks in 2023 appeared first on Qvik.