The brief
YIT, the Finnish construction and property group, wanted one place for its people to share ideas for improving the business. We designed a proof of concept for a mobile ideas app: quick to post to, easy to browse and worth coming back to.
The challenge
Good ideas can come from anyone at YIT, but they are easy to lose without one place to collect them, see what colleagues think and give credit. They also arrive in different forms, from a typed note to a voice recording or a video, and in more than one language.
The app had to make posting easy, keep duplicates down and give people a reason to return.
My role
My experience department at Born ran this work. I set the UX strategy and led the research and design with the team.
I articulated it through a best-practice review, a persona, the user flow and annotated wireframes for the MVP, from sign-in to rewards.
What we did
- Reviewed best practice in loyalty and community apps, alongside YIT's brand guidelines.
- Built a persona: Mika Kallio, an architect in Espoo with ideas to share.
- Mapped the user flow, from single sign-on to creating, finding and rewarding ideas.
- Designed AI help into posting: duplicate checks, suggested tags, summaries and transcripts of audio and video.
- Added points, a rewards gallery and a leaderboard to keep people taking part.
- Wireframed the MVP screen by screen, with annotations for the team.
Persona
Mika Kallio is an architect in Espoo who has been at YIT for eight years. He wants to submit ideas, comment on colleagues' ideas, follow the progress of his own and be recognised for them.
He needs real-time notifications, a secure and confidential place to post, clear rules for earning points and quick search and filtering. His pain points shaped the brief: no reward system, weak tools for collaboration and no easy way to get ideas to leadership.
User flow
The flow starts with a work email and single sign-on. A dashboard shows highlighted ideas, a ticker of ideas submitted and people taking part, and the user's own points.
From there people create an idea, browse and filter ideas, open one in full, check their rewards or manage their account. Ideas can be posted anonymously, then upvoted, followed and commented on, and the person who posted is told when someone responds.
AI assistance
AI helps before an idea goes live, in a set order. Keyword matching flags a possible duplicate, so people can upvote or comment on the existing idea instead of posting it twice. It suggests category tags that may be missing, and offers a short summary for long descriptions.
Audio and video can be transcribed into the description, and people read ideas in their own language, with the option to see the original.
Rewards
Points reward taking part. In the wireframes, posting an idea earns 500 points, and comments on it add more. People spend them in a rewards gallery, from coffee and cinema tickets to gym time, and see where they rank against colleagues.
Point boosts and a spin-the-wheel top-up add a little play, and a points history shows what was earned and spent.
MVP screens
We wireframed the MVP screen by screen and annotated each one: splash and onboarding with YIT's values, sign-in, a home screen with points, recent ideas and rankings, idea creation with attachments and AI help, the ideas feed, rewards, the leaderboard, filters, points history and a profile with a choice of English or Finnish.
Platform workshop
We also ran an experience design session for the YIT Platform, YIT's plan to connect its processes, data and AI around the people who use them. Alongside Tech Mahindra's technology sessions, we introduced experience design and mapped a cost engineer's quantity and costing journey with the team, as a first draft to refine.
The result
A proof of concept that showed how an ideas app could work for YIT from end to end: a persona, a user flow, AI help built into posting, a rewards model and annotated wireframes for every MVP screen.
