#learnfromthegreatest

[heidigital-blog]

Más Vale Tarde Que Nunca

Good afternoon my readers! Since I haven’t given you the pleasure to read my latest blog yet, I will give my best now. And after this there is another task about few thoughts from the events that I participated in; this is obligatory, since I missed the lecture about Ultrahack. (I have met Ian McCready already, heard about Ultrahack personally from him and he actually got me a job of some kind in the Upgraded Life Festival, so I’m kind of familiar with what was on the lecture) Let’s have a look at previous week’s findings about digital world. As the title screams in Spanish, better late than ever.

Kwame Afreh

This lecture was about designing a webpage. Mr. Afreh is a freelance web designer and also a former Laurea student. He got us all intrigued, when having a look at Laurea’s own website design as a prospective student’s point of view. This is after all something, that we all have done at some point, I assume, when trying to figure out where to study. It was clear that there are some wonderful aspects but also many things to develop to make it more user-friendly. This is our task in the SSM project as well; trying to figure out, how they could improve their online looks with some gentle face-lifting. Having suitable versions to all three; tablet, mobile and computer are the things our team has been around for as well. Responsive design does play an important role on what image the peculiar company wants to have within’ users. According to Mr. Afreh, this is not even difficult to re-make, just use building blocks to maintain the same idea throughout and test your design widely. There was great slide “Heuristics For User Interface Design: Jakob Nielsen” that I would like to share with you, with some valuable tips for designers of all kind. Jakob Nielsen is a Danish consult, who has written an exciting book called “Designing Web Usability”, which I highly recommend to read.

It is important to understand, who are your users and why do they visit your webpage. This way you can understand your individual customer needs. Mr. Afreh guided us to use only one column layout and avoid multiple same features, when designing new pages. In addition to that, simplified form fields make the page much more visually attractive. Last but not least we learned about SEO & Website accessibility in general and he asked us to take a look at the competitive websites and pick clues from those. For example, the Posti webpage layout differs quite a bit from SSM’s one and Laurea’s webpage is different from Haaga-Helia’s competitive one. I must say, one of the best university websites is maintained in Helsinki University. Very simple and easy access to whatever you’re searching for. This lecture’s objectives were to be able to define market, users and individual users of the webpage, create stories/cases (SSM has great potentiality to spread this even wider), apply design principles and after all, design a responsive webpage. Our team had some great ideas for SSM to use on their websites and social media altogether.

Jari Laine

From Aalto University, the next speaker talked about digitalization and IOT. Mr. Laine’s presentation was visual and very humorous, I found it very amusing. His presentation was divided into four sections; consumer behavior, competitive innovations, cost reduction and technologies available.

Consumer behavior

First Mr. Laine asked us to define digitalization in our heads and said that Facebook is out. I would a bit disagree, for this module is mostly based on Facebook and all my future events is to be searched there the most convenient way for me. All of my news medias are right there all in one place and my relatives & friends around the world easy to reach. It is very much true though that the digital natives play with different rules and consumers are used to digital services. E-shopping is more and more common and despite the easiness (laziness), I still fancy the old-fashioned way. It is a really good question; What might be the future of eServices?

Digital natives are already hyper-connected and today’s omni-channel thinking will impact other industries, which is seen in consumer touch-points. “Steve Jobs killed Nokia”, stated Mr.Laine and somehow I agree with that. It’s quite a bit ironic that Mr.Jobs is no longer with us and Nokia making a bouncing comeback with their 3310 version of the old school Nokia. Consumers can also be lured by not to making any changes at all, which was the case in Burberry’s tactics. Their label is represented, not consumed. Mr.Laine mentioned fast decision-making to be the key when purchasing online. For example, when buying online flight tickets, don’t get surprised if the prices bounce to skies a week after your first scroll;) There were few sources missing on his presentation of who actually count as digital natives, but he had gathered the data quickly I understood. It is tough to define who is an active user and who is still in denial. This reminds me of the complexity of experimenting new services to potential customers and Henry Ford. When creating the car, the reason he didn’t ask the customers what they wanted, was simply put in his words: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

Competitive Innovation

The saying “boys want what other boys want” is probably not the best to quote in a digital business blog, but I’m going to do it anyway. There is this technology hype that everybody wants to get their foot in. Start-ups are building digital services and traditional companies are challenged the way that they are forced to enter into digitalization. This means that the leading Finnish companies are having dialogue with customers online and via eServices even more, examples worth mentioning here are Fazer and Stockmann. They both have visually and strategically improved their looks online and created positive imago even further.

Cost reduction

Transferring services from traditional to digital world will eventually cut costs and this should get noticed in the public sector, says Mr.Laine. 3D-printing has already regenerated some items for good and works an amazing example on that what is possible in the world we live in today. Hospitals and medical students, warehouses and car factories and sports facilities are benefiting from this already, to name a few. Here’s a link to see what 3D-printing can do.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/07/adidas-latest-3d-printed-shoe-puts-mass-production-within-sight/ Adidas

Technologies available

Viking Line’s Digital Customer Experience was intriguing and informative. Shops on the go are already a savior for many people in a hurry and will be more and more diverse in the future. Our idea as an eService was that there could be just one platform to fill all the papers that need a governmental approval online. This could save some time and could be something to add on the digital registration of cars by Trafi. Similarly, voice recognition will be something that will revolutionize the technology, here’s a good example of that:

http://iamili.com/ WearableTranslator

All in all, technologies that eventually lack human to human touch, will more than ever need one thing for sure. TRUST. That is the valued part that is the glue that sticks the companies and customers together. Take a look at Uber, Airbnb and Tinder applications. Having tried them all, believe me, trust is the key.

Marcin Arcisz

The last speaker came all the way from Academic Work to show us opportunities that occur in the factor, where academic studies and work placement are possible to combine. Academic Work is doing business in cooperation with Laurea UAS. We got a nice presentation of what is the home of the young professionals and which are the new ways of recruiting. Through their company representation, we watched videos from their field of business and the examples shown were Kiinteistömaailma (“Who would ever want to be in the real estate business?”) website and imago upgraded and some talk about LinkedIn marketing & advertisement. Mr.Arcisz ended the presentation with “attitude is what counts” and that’s my thoughts exactly.

Laurea students’ Well-being Event in Seutula and Kivistö district

On a Saturday the 8th of April I got an opportunity to participate in physiotherapy student Jone Vallin’s scholarly thesis event. We worked together with Vantaa area entrepreneurs and students altogether for the well-being of the locals. The idea was to get the people living in Seutula and Kivistö area to come and familiarize themselves with the local offering and that’s where Laurea students hopped in. I was in charge of the marketing and informative site of the event with Jone. I was the only business student, since 95% were future physiotherapists.

There were yoga platforms, zone therapy sessions, massages, balance training, blood pressure tests, gym membership offers and Guasha-treatments. Then there was this option to do some beauty parlor treatments and the ladies went all crazy with that. I did measure my whole body fat and muscle mass with an expensive vehicle because it was free. Don’t know if I ended up laughing after that, but it was beneficial for my training.

What I learned when I wasn’t spending time online, but instead with people of all shapes and ages? I survived a long day with plenty of cups of coffee. I learned a lot from an elderly lady of 85 years old, when I stopped and just listened. I read people’s thoughts and feelings instead of online articles. I didn’t feel stressed after physical work. I slept way better that after scrolling Facebook in the evening. Sometimes it’s best to have these kinds of days as well, just to remind yourself that although everything is available online, you can still end up lost in Vantaa, if you don’t know where the right bus platform is (because your phone died!) and you actually have to talk to people instead of using GPS and online routes. Just saying.

[learningfromthegreatest]

Great quote from @blakemycoskie ‘s book Start Something That Matters. #learnfromthegreatest