Service design and user experience

#user experience #UX design #UI design #usability #service design

Service design and UX design are not just about creating beautiful visuals. A good user experience is a key requirement both for commercial services and for applications intended for internal use – otherwise they will not succeed. This requires user-centered design which also carefully considers business needs, as well as the opportunities and limitations of technology.

If you ignore service design, you may end up solving the wrong problem. In cases like these, the development budget is spent in full, but the end result does not bring the desired benefits. If, on the other hand, you neglect the design of the user experience, the end result can be a solution that no one wants to use.

Our services include:

Comprehensive user experience (UX) design
User Interface Design (UI)
User surveys and testing
UX / UI analysis and enhancement of existing solutions
Service design methods

We have been involved in designing both B2B and B2C online stores, mobile applications, industrial applications, and analytics dashboards, as well as solutions to improve the efficiency of daily work.

All of these have been based on identifying the real needs of users and linking them to business goals. As user satisfaction and efficiency increase, the end result is measured in revenue.

“We want a partner who understands the fast-changing technological environment and supports us in achieving a world-class digital customer experience and giving us the velocity to fuel our growth.”
Elina Björklund, CEO, Reima

Here’s how service design and user experience are related to technical development projects

Our designers are typically involved in every stage of solution development. Here are examples of what our work includes at different stages of the project.

1. Identifying development ideas. Our service design experts help you find genuine problem areas. Initial service design is suitable for you as a service if your company has to solve a business challenge or goal, but are still lacking concrete steps to implement it.

2. Discovery before the development project. Which ideas are worth promoting commercially? With Discovery, we validate whether it is worthwhile to embark on a development project and refine the business case. This step is accurate enough to validate whether the idea is truly both commercially viable and beneficial to users. At the same time, it is light-weight enough, meaning that time and money are not wasted. Read more about the Discovery method in our blog.

3. Delivery. As with our other services, we strive to develop things agilely in terms of user experience. The design, testing and iteration then take place in the same rhythm as the development. For example, if a project involves an interface, our UX designer will be involved in ensuring that the actual end user needs, the constraints of the operating environment, and the desired user experience are all taken into account. The expertise of a UX designer is to constantly synch between business, technology and design.

4. Support. After deployment, we validate success by monitoring metrics set together. As the service enters a mode of long-term development, we iterate toward an ever-improving solution in the long run. Our task is to ensure that the needs of both the business and the users are constantly considered in further development.

“Working with Bilot showed a strong grasp of our industry, understanding the sort of challenges our customers and ourselves faced.”
Matthew Anderson, Data Analytics and Smart Technologies Manager, Sulzer

Examples of challenges we have helped solve

We have helped our customers to move forward, e.g. in the following situations:

How to help modernize your old Legacy system and hardware
How to help management build a business case and investment plan for a new application
How to consider the different needs of several business areas when developing a common platform
How to prepare for the launch of a new multilingual service globally
How to facilitate work in the field, e.g. in customer meetings or maintenance tasks, when the information needs to be made available quickly, reliably and mobile
How to help users spot anomalies and highlight important information to them
How to reduce user manual work and copy-pasting between multiple systems

“Our customers have adopted the digital channel rapidly – we now get 75% of all orders online – and the feedback has been excellent. A great achievement, which again opens up new areas of process improvement.”
Jouni Metsämäki, Senior Vice President, Ruukki

Why Bilot as a partner?

In addition to the technical solution, you will get our service design and overall user experience expertise in one package without the need for a third party.

In addition to design, our experts have technology and business expertise. This helps you identify business needs and technology opportunities and constraints faster and more accurately.

With Bilot, you get a designated service design/UX team that continuously learns more about your business. Continuity is important for success: for example, after the Discovery phase, at least one service designer will continue in the team to avoid interruptions. This also saves our customers time and money, as the team is not constantly bringing new team members up to speed.

We don’t make “nice designs” but functional entities. Which, of course, includes world-class design and user experience.

Get in touch and let’s discuss how we can help improve your service or products. We are happy to show examples from previous cases to give you a better idea of our expertise.