Suunto

Following Suunto's decision to discontinue one of their services, users were left without a meaningful web interface for accessing its data. Although the Suunto mobile application offered many features, there remained a demand for a comprehensive web interface, particularly for "big screen use cases" such as viewing maps, planning routes, and analyzing individual workouts in detail.

One significant challenge arose from the high traffic generated by users sharing workouts from the mobile application. The app.suunto.com web page lacked maintenance and failed to provide relevant information, leaving visitors without a clear path to engage with Suunto as a brand or explore its products. To address this, there was a need to revitalize the web page with minimal effort, integrating it into the broader context of suunto.com and leveraging targeted communication to enhance brand awareness and product visibility.

A discontinued service left users without their data on desktop.

In response to these challenges, our objective was to reimagine and enhance the web interface experience for Suunto users. By providing a user-friendly platform for accessing key features and functionalities, we aimed to improve overall user satisfaction and strengthen Suunto's brand presence online.

Firstly, an ideation workshop was conducted to design solutions for the problems identified in the previous stage. Suunto staff were actively involved in this process, leveraging their existing knowledge. The value-creating solution ideas were derived into concepts and prioritized as needed.

Methods employed included a remote workshop using the Miro collaboration tool, along with ideation and value proposition modeling tools.

The interviews were conducted over a particularly intense two-week period, with multiple one-hour sessions held during each day. Despite the intensity, the interviews proved rewarding, providing an opportunity to ask questions freely and gain insights from talented individuals familiar with the Suunto ecosystem. The approach was open, allowing each interviewee to express their honest opinions, resulting in valuable insights from various perspectives within the Suunto ecosystem.

Competitor analysis was conducted, benchmarking other services with similar use cases and providing the client with a comprehensive view of the field. Eight services were benchmarked from the Suunto use case perspective, and the findings were gathered and presented to the client. This phase aimed to gather as much information as possible about the client, along with learning to use Figma and starting to use the Suunto App in a real sports environment, such as jogging.

Two workshops were facilitated during this phase. The first workshop focused on clarifying business goals and selecting focus use cases for the big screen prototype. The second workshop aimed to delve deeper into the selected use cases to prioritize features. Lean Service Creation toolkit was utilized in both workshops.

Remote workshops, deep user research, iterative pivoting.

During the concept work phase, multiple rounds of wireframes were developed, exploring various angles and design ideas that were gathered and presented to the customer. This phase was greatly supported by Ilmari, whose contributions laid the groundwork for the entire service. Additionally, the design director of Suunto played a significant role in this phase, providing valuable input and guidance.

However, problems arose when the client expressed a desire to pivot our use cases, coupled with the announcement that Windows 11 would support Android apps in the future. As a result, there was a need to revisit many designs, rendering a significant amount of previous work obsolete. The prospect of Windows 11 supporting Android apps also suggested the possibility of utilizing Android and iOS apps instead of developing a standalone service for the big screen.

In response to the use case change, the decision was made to pivot the big screen prototype to focus solely on sharing, a decision deemed wise from Suunto's perspective. Despite these challenges, progress continued to be made smoothly and on schedule. In the end, we managed to create a working service for sharing map data for the suunto users.