THE BIG PICTURE STREAM

In 2009, Gannett went and rethink local news with the help of IDEO in this experiment. It’s now ending. It’s a shame they don’t say why.

Interesting take aways:

This series of photos is my all time favourite visualisation of personas.

Service design in 5 words: user-centerer, co-creative, sequencing, evidencing, holistic.

Happy Holidays!

Archive: 19.12.2014

It's good to think of the big picture during Christmas and New Year's Eve. We had a go and Christmas Brand Stategy. New Year is always a good opportunity to clarify and write down your business and personal goals and strategies.

We wish you a Peaceful Christmas and a Happy New Year 2015. This Christmas season will be the start of our donating to Tikau Share on monthly basis to support  their training indian artisans local handicraft-skills combined with Finnish design know-how and improve shelter against monsoons. 

Amazing Line-up for 99U Conference 2014

Archive: 29.4.2014

During 1-2 May 2014 in NYC, I'll be at 99U Conference. The conference aims at bringing together some of the world's most productive creative visionaries & leading researchers to share pragmatic insights on how to make ideas happen. This includes entrepreneurs like Behhance's Scott Belsky (99U talk), designers like Facebook's Julie Zhuo and authors like Seth Godin (99U talk). Exciting!

“Hello World!”

Archive: 14.4.2014

I'm Mathijs, a product developer from Belgium. Already back in 2010, I wanted to come to Helsinki for a student exchange. I didn’t make it then, as there were many others willing to experience the Nordic design capital. Instead I ended up in London, which is also a great design hub. But now, in 2014 I’m very glad that I made it here.

The Big Picture provides the opportunities to me as I can learn here a lot. I have done some service design before but not so much, the need to gain insight in this field became very clear during my studies. This can lead to better insights on how to design Product Service Systems, which are of great value to build customer experiences. The collaborative approach of The Big Picture is new to me and made me even more curious. This open way of working has great potential I think, so I wanted to get involved and join the team.

New office space!

Archive: 13.12.2013

Co-facilitation at the Design Museum

Archive: 5.11.2013

A few weeks back, we had the pleasure to co-facilitate the Ideaspector workshop at the Design Museum of Helsinki. Milla Ahola's IDEASPECTOR is a set of method cards to help generate visual ideas. They cards are part of the graphic design exhibition DON'T SHOOT THE MESSENGER at the Design Museum of Helsinki, which ends January 12th, 2013. Go have a look, definitely worth it!

IDEASPECTRUM is a collection of creative viewpoints that are meant to be used during an ideation workshop to as triggers to come up with visual ideas. Some examples are (a) right can be wrong,  (b) play with time, (c) use a cliché and (d) play with forms. You can get familiar with the cards at the exhibition, or in some of our workshops ;)

People had the chance to participate to the Ideaspector workshop on October 29th, 2013 at the Design Museum, where they could use the cards to solve 4 preselected problems that where collected from the exhibition visitors.

Awarded problems and in workshop best voted solutions for them follow.

X How to inspire companies to protect nature? = Create status + pride with re-use, re-cycling + fixing.

X How to get your first design job? = Find your own passion.

X How can we help migrants who drown trying to come to EU? = Migrants Super Cell.

X How to make life less chaotic and accidental? = Problem recycling.

Dockify: a new way to organize your iPhone apps

After the iPhone entered my life, I've had a new closet to keep tidy. My phone. To give you an idea of how many pairs of apps I have in my iPhone, I'll share some stats.

STATS

My Inventory: . 1 iPhone . 83 apps

My Usage: . 9 apps used daily . 14 apps used weekly . 23 apps used monthly . 5-10 apps used sporadically . 5-10 apps on trial that I have rotating

Reference from 2012: It seems that I am a bit behind, as Go-Gulf's infographic indicates that the average iPhone user downloads in average 48 apps per month!?

BACKGROUND

Over the past few years, I have been sporting an iPhone; and like many others, I love it. I don't need to go into details. Like in all love relationships, you must accepted or at least learn how to deal with the other person's more difficult features. Well in this case, that other person is my iPhone (lately being even personified by Apple, with the Siri feature, and then forgotten). The most important issue I've had with my iPhone has been to keep my apps organized. Before the folder feature appeared, I used to group my apps with pages, but for someone who wants more than 3 groups, it becomes quite a pain in the next swiping an endless amount of pages. Then, when the folder was released as part of iOS 4, I started grouping the apps using the folders, which was a lot better. But quickly I noticed that folders didn't solve all of my app organization issues. All folders look rather similar, so scanning and finding a folder from a group of many folders was quick intense, or as one could describe it, has a lot bigger cognitive load than distinguishing between normal icons. So, I came up with my own organization pattern, which has helped me not only to fit my 83 apps on 2 pages, but also to increase my apps navigation experience :) Let me describe my trick.

METHOD

The method consists in combining Dock effectivity, folder functionality and icon scalability. I call it Dockify (derived from Dock+Folder+Icon, and don't ask me how I derived it :P). Before we continue, I strongly recommend you start by going a couple of times through your apps and throw away the ones you haven't used in the last few months. Done? Here we go…

Step 1: Dock Pick your 4 favorite apps and place them to the Dock.

iPhone Dock

Step 2: Folder Group all the rest of the apps by category into folders and name them accordingly (Certain apps, like Newsstand, can't be placed into folders so just think of them being in a folder, in your imagination). The categories I use are: Bookmarks, Notes, Photography, Social (all communication apps), Work, Settings, Media (music & video apps), Reading, Lifestyle, Navigation, Games, Utilities & Fun.

Step 3: Icon Pick the most used app in each folder and drag it out of the folder. Then place it right before the folder. That app icons will act as the visual anchors for the categories.

Voilà! You've just organized your apps gooood :) This makes navigating the apps a lot more effective and pleasant.

iPhone organized home screen

I will now go a little deeper in the analysis of why this is such a effective method to scan your apps and categories. The new way the page is structured removes half the apps you need to scan to find categories or apps, since half of them are now folder icons. We only need to scan 2 columns of up to 4 icons per page, or 2 vertical Docks. Additionally, this makes it really easy for the user to build a mental model of where her/his apps are.

ALTERNATIVES

There are some other ways, people have organized their apps. . No app on the home screen. Just 2 folders in the Dock with Philips' method (http://articles.businessinsider.com/2010-08-05/tech/30031545_1_ios-iphone-apps) . Secondary Dock - built out of folders on the lower row. See the image on Lifehacker's thread (http://lifehacker.com/5715135/how-do-you-organize-your-smartphones-home-screen) . Interesting Positioning method (http://brooksreview.net/2011/03/homescreen-organized/) . Just plain folders (http://gigaom.com/apple/ios-101-using-folders-and-spotlight-to-organize-your-home-screen/)