“Our collaboration with Huld went well. Service design and UX design guaranteed that the Vuorovaikutuspassi Vilo truly fulfils its users’ needs.” – Henna Sillanpää, Founder, Kommunikaatio ILO.
Kommunikaatio ILO provides communication lessons and guidance for people with speech impairment or language disorder and for people who help them in their daily lives. ILO’s goal is to bring their customers a sense of achievement in their daily lives and interactions while taking into account their personal needs and right of self-determination.
Kommunikaatio ILO wanted to develop a user-friendly application for people who need support in their daily interactions. The goal was to create an application that would work as a tool for self-expression, so that people with special needs would be heard better. Even though products with similar purpose already exist around the world, they cannot be found in Finland.
When the need for an interaction passport app was recognized, ILO chose Huld as their partner to bring their idea to life.
The close collaboration began with clarifying the goals and limitations of the Interaction Passport using Huld’s Design Puzzle method, which utilizes agile service design. With the Design Puzzle, the stakeholders of the interaction passport app were clarified, and the most important user groups were prioritized. The needs and challenges of single user groups were thoroughly studied in separate workshops, and a detailed user journey was created based on the discussions. The work was complemented with a market analysis of similar applications.
”We chose a dentist appointment as the use case based on the findings and made a clear user journey for it in both physical and digital environments. A user journey that has been carefully surveyed clarifies the needs of users in real-life situations.” – Mimosa Sukanen, Service Designer, Huld.
After the project had been outlined with Design Puzzle, the work was continued with UX design and by designing the features of the application in practice. Accessibility played an especially important role when the application was conceptualized for people who need support in daily interactions, self-expression, and self-determination.
”The users had many special needs and requirements for accessibility, which were taken into consideration in the conceptual phase of the product. As a general rule, accessibility must already be at a good level in modern products. With thorough conceptualization, accessibility can be integrated into the application at an early stage before coding is started.” – Lauri Kaartinen, UX/UI Designer, Huld.
As a result of the collaboration, a prototype of Vuorovaikutuspassi Vilo, the interaction passport app was created. Kommunikaatio ILO was then able to test their idea with end-users. The comprehensive conceptualization and early tests clearly proved that the application is useful and much needed and gave a sturdy base for further development of Vuorovaikutuspassi Vilo.
