The VISUAL case studies form the basis for assessing and developing the VISUAL language through practical application. The second industry case study in VISUAL was hosted by FINN.no, Norway’s largest digital market place with approximately 3.5 million unique visitors a week.

Through the FINN.no website, individuals and businessesConcurrency can sell or buy products ranging from furniture to motor vehicles, find real estate, look for or offer craftsman services, and more. Most of the exchanges of information between buyers and sellers are supported by self-service platforms.

The purpose of this case study was to investigate the journey that small companies experience when they try to become corporate customers of FINN.no. “Some of the systems for corporate advertisers are known to be handled manually by sales personnel, involving many instances of phone calls and e-mail exchange with customers”, says Kathinka Fürst Ihlen, Product Manager at FINN.no. “We must develop and redesign this process further and adjust it to fit the other systems in our service”, she adds.

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VISUAL is tested iteratively each year through empirical case studies with our industry partners, as a basis for assessing and developing the language. The energy supplier Hafslund Strøm was the host of the first industry case in VISUAL.

Thor Haugnæss

“In recent years we have adopted several new communication channels to support the dialogue with our customers,” says Thor Haugnæss, business developer at Hafslund. “It is challenging to provide a consistent customer experience across all the channels, especially since there are several actors within the Hafslund group who are involved and directly touches upon the customer relationship.”

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During the last 10-15 years there has been a lot of focus on the service designer as part of design agencies. Evidence of this can be found by looking at who is tweeting, who are active on linkedin groups, and the lineup of speakers at conferences for professionals. Not that there are no other roles and no other organisations that service designers are working in. Just as in any other design discipline there will of course be so called “in-house” service designers. Architects are working in building companies, interaction designers are working in public sector organisations, etc. In earlier work by Holmlid and Artman, focusing on procurement of well-designed IT-systems, we noted that there are strategic, managerial as well as design practice implications of an in-house position.

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