Go Mobile And Prepare To Change Everything

Antti Kujala at UXDX Community: Helsinki. Video: https://youtu.be/pyAm0V_XSBY

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Introduction and the Suunto brand

[00:00:03] Thank you for joining us in these quite exceptional times. I think it's great to step away for a moment from the realities of what we're hitting and talk about just professional things for a moment. My name is Antti Kujala and, like I said, I'm head of design at Amer Sports [?] and Suunto, and today I will tell you about how going mobile actually changed pretty much everything that we did a few years back.

[00:00:33] Just to introduce myself briefly: I've been in the design business for probably over 20 years myself, and I actually come from a product design background, so I've been doing all kinds of stuff during my career. Like I said, pretty much half of Finland at the time was working for Nokia, so I also have a background at Nokia, and I've been building mobile phones. That little one [?], by the way, is the best-selling mobile phone in the world according to Wikipedia, so I'm very proud of the team that we were with. We were building watches, mobile phones, mobile accessories, and mostly now we will be talking about digital experience and building the Suunto mobile app.

[00:01:18] Just to give you guys a bit of context about what Suunto actually is: most of the Finns here in the call probably know Suunto, but let's run a really, really brief video to get you in the mood of what the brand stands for. Let's hope the sound works.

[00:01:33] (Video:) Every adventure begins with a single step. So does everything here. The path to success is often the same as failure most of the way. The only difference: making the right decisions at the right time. Suunta in Finnish means direction; Suunto means the right direction. Experience by Suunto.

When the web was king

[00:02:09] That's very briefly about the brand itself. It's a really cool Finnish brand. It's been out there since 1936, and the purpose of the brand is really to equip and inspire people to lead an adventurous, active life. It really stands for adventure, and that's reached through being really active through your life.

[00:02:29] Now, how are we actually serving our consumers? Let's roll back about eight years in our history. Eight years ago the world used to be really simple for us as designers, as developers, as engineers. Eight years ago we introduced our first GPS training watch. It was a real cool product: it actually got GPS in that case [?], and it would show speed, distance, all your body metrics, and it was a sales success. That was called the Suunto Ambit [?]. Then we had also introduced our web service, a sports diary and sports service, which is basically a web-based service, a web client service with a cloud back end.

[00:03:14] We had a really simple idea: people would go training, then come home, take a shower, then plug their watch into their PC, download their training data and start going through those statistics. The whole idea of the service was that you have a lot of statistics. We were serving really pro athletes, or at least wannabe pro athletes or adventurers, and they just want to see a lot of this data. We had about 23 different variables or parameters to show in every single exercise, and it was cool and simple to us.

[00:03:48] Then things got a bit more complicated. In about a year or so, in the first generation of this watch, we started thinking, wait a minute, we actually want to make this a bit easier for the user. Ironically, making it easier for the users made it much more complicated for us in-house. We still had the watch, we had the second generation, I think, and third generation of the same product coming out, and we thought that this cable connection was a bit clunky and fell behind [?] what's out there. We thought, let's build a wireless solution, and we introduced the mobile app, which was basically just a companion app. You would just connect that mobile app on your mobile phone, sync it with the watch, and then you could download your statistics again after the training and taking a shower. You don't have to plug in the cable, it just downloads stats, and you still go to your web browser, open up the service and look at your stats. The web is still king, but we thought this is kind of cool, that you don't have to plug in anything anymore.

[00:04:53] Then we got greedy, but greedy for the users' good, so I think that kind of justifies it a bit. We thought it would be really nice to have a quick view of your training already before you go to the PC. What if you actually could have a summary of your training? We started building these views, and the app started getting more complicated, more feature-rich. You could actually see your "moves", as we called your activities, on the mobile. Maybe there's a moment after your training, before your shower, when you actually want to know how fast you ran.

[00:05:26] We actually kept on this track and started building more and more of these things. We started building social features, so we'd have this live feed where you could see where your friends have been training. We even thought about having some commercial messages through the app. But in the end, still, the web is king. Basically, whatever we did for the mobile phone, in the end the web was the king of the hill in our minds, so that was where we actually put most of our efforts.

[00:05:56] We built these really fancy user flow charts. We really thought seriously about the whole flow. We had this idea of how people would behave, how they would get inspired, how they would get engaged, set goals, et cetera. We built these really serious-looking models that we actually believed in ourselves. It was good, and it was still pretty simple, though more complicated. We had some challenges with how we tried the mobile application; we had to build this whole connectivity layer, et cetera. But we were feeling it was still under control.

A lesson from China

[00:06:33] Then, as in life, something happens. This change actually came from China; our learning came from China. We were doing one of our annual business trips. I try to go to China at least once a year, because I think the rate of change of technology, and how people adapt to it, is so fast that if you go less than once a year you are missing out on many of the big things. Roll back to, I think, spring 2016, on one of those business trips, and our local team had organized: hey, let's meet with our target users. We had a bit of a user workshop there.

[00:07:18] I remember this one lady, a really smart lady who was also a bit of a runner, meeting us and saying, by the way guys, your watches look beautiful, but your digital experience sucks. What she told us was that no Chinese user would go and open up a PC, even at work, unless they have to go to the tax office or China Railway. People just don't use their PCs, which was totally unheard of for us: what do you mean they don't use PCs?

[00:07:47] We started getting more serious and thought, okay, we need to go back to China and really learn more about this. We set on this path that we need to get this mobile app more prominent. I love this picture; this is one of my favorite pictures ever. We did a couple of consumer studies with an agency, and then towards the end of 2016 we went to China ourselves and organized this co-creation workshop week. We were sitting in one room at our offices in Shanghai [?], we had users next door with a facilitator, and we had a live feed from the other room. Then we had simultaneous translation, which was great: this lady in the pink shirt would tell us in English what the guys were saying. And then we had simultaneous design. Our designer [?] was actually putting in new features, at the time using InVision [?], building quick prototypes and then carrying them next door and showing the users: is this what you want?

Falling in love with a mobile-first concept

[00:08:41] We were really excited and went, wait a minute, let's make this app really prominent. It was really fun times, and we got really excited. What actually happened was that we built our first concept, and we got really, really happy about the idea. I still think it's a cool idea. We had this really prominent first home screen and this colorful design, and we really fell in love with the design.

[00:09:14] We started piling on all these other concept features. We were building an activity feed, really about how you get real-time activation for the users and see what your buddies are doing. We built these rich summaries, where you bring prominent visuals, overlay them with data graphics and make them cool and simple social objects. We even thought of micro coaching. You have to think that at the time Suunto didn't really speak through the service in natural language, but mostly showed people graphs and data, so this was also news to us. And then privacy: obviously when you go mobile you have to think much more carefully about the whole privacy thing. This was pre-GDPR, but we still had to think of that.

[00:09:56] These were exciting times. This was towards the end of 2016, beginning of 2017, and we were making it real, that yes, we're going to finally have a mobile-first experience. Our leadership was also behind the idea, and we started rolling.

Change one: build on what you already have

[00:10:12] Then somebody asked the question and did the calculation of how much it would actually cost, and reality hit us. We realized that it is actually very expensive to go from this pretty easy HTML-based web service to really start building a mobile app on two different platforms, iOS and Android, from scratch. We had no assets to build on, we had no baseline code; we would literally be starting from scratch, pretty much, because we felt that the original app that we had wasn't a really good base to develop from.

[00:10:50] That kind of led us to the first change that started coming. What actually had happened, and this sounds silly in hindsight, but companies are often looking at things from their current viewpoint: we had already acquired a brand called Sports Tracker. This was basically a start-up, a spin-off from the Nokia days, and it was a really, really good mobile application for sports tracking. We had it, and the idea was that we would develop it into something where we could activate people to use our sports brands, like Suunto, Atomic, Wilson, et cetera, and also learn about the users. But we never really had a realistic plan for integrating it with anything else.

[00:11:38] We started looking at it, realizing the cash needed for building something from scratch, and we realized, wait a minute, we could actually take this codebase and redesign it to also cater for Suunto watches, which sounds really natural at the moment. We had to build the connectivity layer, because Sports Tracker at the time was not really meant to connect to anything other than the heart rate belt. But apart from that, we were able to reuse the basic assets, reskin and redesign them.

[00:12:10] We were skeptical, because we really had those cool ideas about the design. But when we actually got into the design, as you can see, you can use the base, you can use the same assets, but you can still build a unique feel for the brand. And the good thing was that Sports Tracker already had really good UX. It was basically a five-star app in the App Store and Play Store, it had analytics tools in there, and pretty good libraries in place. That was the first change: we really realized, let's actually go for something we already have, and we don't have to build everything from scratch.

Change two: design for the small screen

[00:12:55] The second change that we had was the UX design philosophy. When we actually started rolling out the idea of the project, getting the app out, we hit another reality. People in the company were actually skeptical. By the time we started, the Movescount [?] web service was, I think, six years old, and it had been seriously developed. There was a lot of skepticism in the company from people saying, well, you can't do that on a small screen, you can't do certain things on a small screen, you will need the big screen. Because of that, we really had to focus on how you make the designs work on the small screen.

[00:13:38] One of the key things, the pet hate of the guys who loved the big-screen experience, was route planning, as you can see on this page. We have this great feature: we have mapped about 250 million exercises on the planet as a heatmap. Anywhere you go, if you happen to come to Helsinki [?] for the first time, you can open up our app and look at those heatmaps. Open up the map, and if you want to go running, you select run, you will see where people have been running, and you can actually build a route, import it into your Suunto watch and then go running. It's a great feature, and I think we actually proved that you can make this feature work on a small screen. I think it works fantastically, and I encourage everybody to try it. It's free, just try it and see how it works. We were proving that things can be done on a small screen, which in hindsight also sounds almost silly, but it was big.

Change three: DevOps and going agile

[00:14:30] The third change that we went through when going mobile was DevOps, and I'm using this word very loosely, so apologies if I misuse it. I think here the change was the most profound, and we probably still as a company don't really realize how big a change it was. I'm trying to use this illustration to show you how far we came from. This is the world view in the Middle Ages, the Earth-centric model. If you listen to history podcasts [?], you know that people really thought the Earth was the center of the universe and everything else revolved around it. And obviously, if you've done any history of astronomy, you know that it isn't like this, so astronomers at the time really had to build these crazy ways to calculate how the planets really move.

[00:15:24] For us, we were also operating that way: the watch programs, the sports watch and dive computer programs, were the center of the universe for Suunto. I think that's important, because these watches have to go through certain testing, they have to be built to the most meticulous standards, so it's of course important that you have a steady waterfall [?] process for building these.

[00:15:51] The problem was that when we started getting more active with the mobile app, we realized that the app actually doesn't follow the same rules. First of all, the app is going to serve more than just one watch, so you can't just follow one watch program's schedule; you have to serve multiple programs. Also, people are not expecting mobile apps to be updated just once a year, maybe like the watches; they expect them to be updated several times a year. We really had to go through this operational model where we couldn't follow the same old waterfall model of the watch programs. We had to go agile.

[00:16:39] We started building up our own teams for mobile development, and we started going through agile, like [?] was explaining, and lean [?], so we also started using similar methods, principles and tools. And in all of this we also launched our first beta. In our history of 80-plus years we had never launched anything as big. We have of course the field testing community, but we had never launched anything as big. We really publicly invited people: we're going to launch this app, this beta will be coming out later, and we invite you to give public feedback about it. We were so scared, but I think it was just so beautiful as a learning for us when people started giving us feedback. We were really able to learn so much faster.

Change four: analytics and the engagement matrix

[00:17:33] The next change that we went through was the analytics piece. When you go to mobile, you realize there's a massive opportunity to be much more analytics-driven and learn about the consumers faster, because on mobile it's natural to utilize analytics, much more so than on the web. It's in a real-time connection with the net all the time, it's with you all the time, we carry it with us, the usage rate is really high because you fondle it all the time, and there are a lot of tools available for the mobile platforms. We started using a tool called Amplitude, and the data started flooding in. We set up a small analytics team, and they started tracking and following these together with the development.

[00:18:36] The interesting thing was that this also changed the way we worked. Previously we'd been building up these features: we built up a roadmap and features and said, okay, we might have a specialist in the team who says, I've spoken to X number of runners, or triathletes, and I know that these features are super important for them. But we never measured afterwards how it actually works.

[00:19:02] Through the data we were able to build what you'd call an engagement matrix, really looking into how many people are using a certain feature we've created, and how often they're using it. Obviously you want to go to this red box of primary value, where all of your users will be using it all the time. That's the killer feature [?]. Then you might have secondary features, which not everybody is using, but everybody uses at first, maybe just once, like setting up the rear-view mirror in your car: you do it once and then carry along, but you probably wouldn't buy a car without it nowadays. You might have segment value, where there's a very small group of people, but they use it all the time, so they're very loud. Then there's nice [?] value. When we started looking at the data, we realized it was a really humbling experience: something we thought might be primary, a real killer feature, ended up being nice, not really used. And obviously through the data you can also look into that in more detail.

Change five: follow up on how features are used

[00:20:07] That leads us to the next change. We also realized that we don't really follow up on how people are using the stuff that we create, how it really works out there. If we go back to this fantastic route planning, this great feature: we believed that it's so easy, we proved that you can do routes on mobile and make it really useful and usable. We started actually analyzing the data, and we got this terrible realization that nobody is using it. You've got people coming to the map screen, and we thought that the vast majority would be building routes, and they are not doing it, they're not building them.

[00:20:52] We started digging deeper into Amplitude and really started engaging our own designers [?]: hey guys, you need to understand how people are behaving when they're actually using the features that you have created. This is super interesting. You can go backwards and forwards, and you can really analyze in Amplitude how these things work. Where are my users actually ending up on that map screen? Are they really creating routes, or are they just going somewhere else and coming back frustrated?

[00:21:27] Training our designers to use these tools was one thing. The other thing that we also wanted to do, and we learned to do it, was building these triggers. When you start designing, you're not just designing it; you start building triggers into which parts of this UI, this flow, you want people to touch. You put them in almost like a minefield, pardon the expression, so that you have those triggers in place and can actually go and analyze how the feature performed. In the old world, if somebody didn't use it, you'd just read the feedback from the test users and then abandon the feature: okay, route planning just sucks. But here we are now able to look into the features and then actually improve the user experience through the users. That was a big learning. Our designers are now starting to behave and act that way; we start thinking already in the design stages about how we get the data.

Change six: user engagement on steroids

[00:22:41] Then there's one more change in this whole thing, which is user engagement. How do we actually engage with users? With the web service that we had back in the day, we really didn't have that much engagement. We would do mass emails if we wanted to get a message through, and we obviously had our social media channels, but there wasn't really active feedback as such.

[00:23:08] What we can do now is target the message. Within the mobile app we can bring users updates and messages. We can bring those as pop-up images, we can bring them as lock screen messages, and we can make those messages appear as part of the activity feed, so it feels like a natural part of the user's flow. What's also more important is that we can actually look at these consumers. Through the data we can know who the users are that might be most interested in using, for example, route creation, so we can target and tailor the input and the message in the app so it doesn't feel like spam [?].

[00:23:54] We can get into much more detail: we can try through A/B testing which of these messages work. We can encourage people: hey, we've got this fantastic route planning feature, this is how you do it, here's a tutorial, please try it, please give us feedback. This whole engagement loop was like engagement on steroids, which helped us be much faster in real-life targeting of users, also learning from them and having a meaningful dialogue.

What changed, and what going mobile means

[00:24:23] I'm kind of rushing through the story, so let me try to wrap it up. What has really changed? It all sounds cool, and it sounds like we learned a lot during those couple of years. So where do we stand as a team now? How do we operate, and what did we learn? First of all, the most important thing is that the mobile app is now treated as a product. It's treated as an equal product to the watch programs. The watch is no longer the king, no longer the center of the universe. Obviously it is important, we still build watches, but the app is a product.

[00:24:57] What we did was nominate our first dedicated product owner, [?], who is running the whole product development and the business development for the mobile. We launched dedicated Android and iOS development teams, so there's a dedicated team lead for both, and they're running and building up the app, because they really are two different animals, almost two different products, the iOS and Android apps, even if we try to align the features and design as much as we can. Then we have dedicated budgets. Part of the budget used to be dictated by the watch programs, but now we have dedicated budgets for mobile development. And obviously we have an independent release schedule, so we are releasing much more often, multiple releases a year. We have big releases that come with public messages and commercial messages, and we have quiet releases that come out with improvements, and we're learning all the time. We've really become much more bold and agile in terms of releases.

[00:26:02] All in all, I would say that when you go mobile, it's going to be hard, it's going to be really heavy, it's going to take a lot of time and money, and it's going to be a completely different clock speed from anything you've done before. You will also be required by your users to have much more engagement and much faster updates. People don't wait six months for an update; they actually want them much faster. But on the other side, you will learn a completely new way of working, you will have much better engagement with the users, and I think it will have an influence on almost every aspect of the operation. I really encourage you guys to take this learning and consider what it means to go mobile. Thank you so much, I hope this was entertaining and exciting.