Employer: Vaisala Oyj
Dates: Jun - Sep, 2017
My role: Visual and Industrial Design
Skills: Visual communication, Project planning & conducting
Summer Internship
The challenge
The Industrial Design Guideline plays an important role in building a systematic design language for the internal design team in Vaisala. However, the existing Industrial Design Guideline is outdated and disorganized with overwhelming information. A more clear structure and a more narrative way of displaying information are required in updating the Industrial Design Guideline for the internal website.
"The goal of the project was to modernize the appearance, increase the impact and improve the ease of use of the design guidance.” The updating program was conducted based on the company website template, so my responsibility were focused on building a clear information architecture and interpreting design language through visualization.
The Progress
The Industrial Design Guideline (PAG) was updated to be a separate section on the new Sharepoint of Vaisala’s internal website. Following the mindset of doing service design, I first defined the updating principles and the focus of work as below:
I started by understanding the main users, which were the product managers, the UX team and the mechanical engineers. Besides working closely with the UX team, I conducted design games with 3 product managers and interviews with 4 mechanical engineers as well. The aim of the games with product managers were defining the segmentation of typical Vaisala products, which would be shown as good examples in the guideline. Interviews with engineers were aimed to find out what information they need in the guideline and which would be the proper way to demonstrate.
A new Information Architecture was structured as a guidance for the project. The new PAG website was categorized into four sections: Introduction, Mission, PAG Tools and Gallery.
Outcomes: Visualization
In the new Industrial Design Guideline website, design principles and guidelines were interpreted into stories and conversations around two characters: the designers and the engineers.
Design Process
Category Cover Pages
Launching Posters
The summer training program was a great experience for me to learn and grow in a company. I was very grateful that I have the freedom to manage and to design the whole updating project. The UX team members always encouraged me that "it’s easy to be boring.” So I could make full use of my skills in narrative visualization to accomplish this project.
