A travel portal to support local service providers

See it live

• Why: local business owners from Teisko wanted to show what it means to be from Teisko
• How: we teamed up with Antti Järvinen from Alupark and we adopted a collaborative and lean, design driven approach to the challenge
• What: we utilized a Brand Sprint and Lean Service Creation to define and validate the Visit Teisko brand and its service prototype in less than 10 working days.

My role

I was responsible of leading, facilitating and executing the design work of the project - Antti was reponsible for overall project management and implementation. Here are some of my key activities:

• Initial estimation and budgeting of the design work for the project
• Scheduling and facilitating the co-creation workshops
• Coaching the business owners into conducting customer interviews on their own for first hand insights
• Designing the visual identity system and brand
• Designing, building, iterating and validating an interactive prototype of the final service-to-be.

Process

Strategy first

The first step was to define the purpose and goal for the initiative. We approached this through a brand sprint, starting with the long term goals and the "why", the purpose of this brand coming into existence. We identified the main customer and user groups and defined the general tone for the brand.

This was my first time running a long, remote workshop during the global COVID-19 pandemic. We chose Miro as the platform. The workshop proceeded surprisingly smoothly and workshopping in the physical space translated super well to the virtual one. My biggest takeaway that I learned was that virtual workshop breaks need to be very generous: my current rule is twenty minutes every hour.

The workshop results were documented to the Visit Teisko Brand book.

Who is it for? Do they need it?

After the initial definition of the strategy, we proceeded to validate the customer and user groups and their needs. We drafted a rough user journey map and defined our key targets on what we should learn from interviewing them. We distilled our key findings into insights which would fuel the concepting process. I participated with the business owners for a couple of interview sessions to guide them on the best practices of conducting interviews in addition to carrying out my own set of interviews.

Concepting, prototyping

The concepting was kicked off with a collaborative workshop, where we applied an adapted version of a method called 4-step sketch.

The restrictions were lifted at the time of the concepting workshop, so we decided to have a face to face workshop. It was fun!

My team mate, Antti, suggested that we divide the group into pairs for concepting instead of having individual concepts. This way we ended up with maybe fewer concepts but by pairing up for the concepting the threshold for people unaccustomed for sketching was clearly significantly lowered, allowing the process to flow much more smootlhy than normally when people are sketching maybe first time. This was a clever hack to boost the already tried and true process.

After the 4-step sketch concepts reviewed and consolidated, a high-fidelity prototype was constructed in Figma.

Validating the concept

We validated the concept prototype by conducting some guerrilla user testing. We carried out the testing in a similar manner to the user interviews. I coached the business owners to the ins and outs of user testing in addition to carrying out tests on my own.

The concept had a positive reception with both on the travellers as well as other business owners in the area. In the first phase the goal was to onboard as much of the local businesses to the platform as possible. The initial goal of at least five additional service providers has already been passed at the time of writing this. What kind of impact the platform and the brand will have on the area on a more general level? Time will tell (as well as the site metrics and business viability).

The project has sparked enough interest to be featured in a local newspaper. The article featuring our service is super positive, praising the travel portal and its look and feel.

Reflection

The project execution and phasing and its outcomes were well received by all the project stakeholders. No projects or products exist without room for improvement, though. The main challenge from the outset was the scheduling. We maintained schedule, but surely this project could have been done much more faster if there would have been need to do so.

Successes:

• Working days-wise, the project was a huge success
• We maintained schedule and budget
• A lean, collaborative and human-centered design approach.

Challenges:

• The project could have been done faster calendar-wise.

Background

Teisko is the largest area by landmass in Tampere, Finland. It is known for its beautiful nature and wilderness by one of the largest lakes in Finland, lake Näsijärvi. The business scene in Teisko is brimming, filled with different kinds of interesting and novel services for tourists and locals, such as a local winery - a rarity in Finland, cabin and sauna rental services and many different kind of relaxing and refreshing activities.

Don't miss out. Head on to the wilderness of Teisko!