Lindström provides workwear for hundreds of customers but were not able to communicate with them regarding the laundry and maintenance cycles of the clothes. This led to customers not having the clothes maintained enough and the clothes became unusable too fast. Lindström needed to improve their communication with the UPM mill workers. The initial idea was to offer a mobile service that would be available in the right place at the right time. In this service the workers would be able to manager their rental workwear laundry and maintenance cycles.
My role as a service designer was to find out the business requirements and previous experiences that Lindström had had with this type of service and how they communicated currently with the users of their products. Based on the current understanding I designed the preliminary prototype of the service and wrote an interview script to find out the users’ needs before meeting the paper mill workers at the paper mill.
Me and my service designer work pair met with the UPM paper mill workers at the UPM paper mill in Kuusankoski. We interviewed their contact person who coordinated the workwear matters with the workers, we observed the premises (dressing rooms), how the clothes were delivered to employees, how the laundry cycle was arranged and then we observed where the actual work was done in the factory and interviewed the workers in different roles.
The field-study is always eye-opening experience and we analysed and improved our preliminary prototype according to the comments. Lindström was extremely happy with the improved design and it was implemented as a POC (Proof of concept) for the factory workers for 6 months to validate the findings.
- Business requirements gathering and project planning with the client
- Field-study method: User research / Interviews
- Interaction and prototype design
- Field-study method: User research / Interviews
- Interaction and prototype design
- Guiding and coordinating the tasks with the development team (POC design)
