For almost any company summer is the slowest time of the year. Most of the customers are having summer holidays and there isn’t that much work to do. Nevertheless, workers are still in company payroll and salaries has to be paid. Seven-1 advertisement agency wanted to develop new ways to enhance their daily operations by using agile service design methods, so that they could find new revenue streams for the summers and years to come. The company contacted the SINCO personnel to get some fresh ideas. Well, they called to the right place. Industrial design students from the University of Lapland  were ready to take the challenge!

Starting point for the project was to create a service, that has similarities to tangible product or object. The idea was, that after the mobile or web based service is launched, it will run on it’s own, as far it is possible in any situation. Main point for developing the new service was that the user has to be able to buy the service easily- ”box from the shelf” type of way. Service had to be cheap and beneficial for the user. Every party has to win. No one should feel cheated and the whole service has to be transparent to the user.

Difference in this project compared to other ones that has been done in SINCO is it’s emphasizing into handheld device applications and web based services. Interaction between the service provider and the user happened through application or web page, so face to face kind of service moments were nowhere to be found. All the communication had to be done using some kind of device which is connected to the internet. After (find phase) bencmarking, defining users and interviewing them, creating stakeholder maps etc. the group started ideating new services.  Lot of ideation was conducted by doing rough paper mockups and in the beginning just by listing all the ideas down, even how small or ridiculous idea was. Soon the technology, iPod, iPad & document camera came into play.

SINCOs technology gave opportunity to do fast paper mockups of the services, and testing them so that the user could be further apart from the service provider. Students played different roles in these cases, and they evaluated each service from several standpoints. Service provider could do ”backstage operations” by operating the service with paper mockup  using document camera to send the feed to the users iPod. User could use the ”paper mockup application” verbally. ”Okay, I press now the setup- button…ok, I can adjust the radius here…go back…”. iPad was also used as a real life mobile application. Mobile services were first made into PowerPoint presentation with hidden links to other page. After that, the presentation was printed into pdf file, so that the user could use the pdf with iPad in application kind of way. When some icon was pressed, something really happened. Service scene was adjusted to match the current using situation of the user, so that the best using scenario could been achieved.

After several iteration phases the group ended up with one final concept. Web based service utilizes different wants that people have. List and tell what you want, you might get it for free! Web service collects different user data from the service users. Information can be e-mail addresses and any other information based on what the user is willing to give. New service collects more local and precise data than the competitors have. Users can win products and services that they have wanted, and even when not actually winning the prize, user can still have different limited time discounts from service and product providers which have deal with Seven-1. Seven-1 seemed to be happy to the end result and company is willing to continue working the concept further. Industrial design students will continue developing the concept in the autumn.

So, like the previous Governator of California said, “We’ll be back”!