Case Otavamedia

Crafting better user experiences for one of the biggest media companies in Finland.

Founded in 1934, Otavamedia is one of the oldest and most prolific players in the Finnish media landscape. Like many others of its kind, Otavamedia's publications are increasingly enjoyed in the online environment. With this in mind, Otavamedia asked us to help them in improving the digital user experience of their classic magazines. The main goals were driving more subscriptions and making the content easier to navigate.

We began our work with Suomen Kuvalehti – a classic publication known for over 100 years of high-quality journalism. The focus was on creating clearer information architecture and making the user experience of the paywall system more fluid. The latter was built to serve as a future blueprint for other Otavamedia magazines as well.

Client

Otavamedia

Industry

Media

Platform

Web

Services

Service design / UX/UI Design / Prototypes

3.6M
MONTLY READERS ON ALL OTAVA SITES
XXX
Lorem ipsum

Navigating content with ease

The online version of Suomen Kuvalehti was riddled with unclear user paths and confusing navigation. In order to fix the situation, we began the work by consulting the editors and auditing the whole current site. Moreover, we received invaluable user feedback collected by Digitalist Group.

Going through all this data, the pieces began to fall into place. The new user experience feels much cleaner, the articles are easier to find and making new subscriptions is now hassle-free.

"At our workshops and weekly meetings, it was nice to see that people from Otava were really enthusiastic about the project. Their insights combined with the ongoing user research really helped us to get the most out of the service design methods."

Ida Silaste, UX Designer, Taiste

Fast problem-solving with prototypes

We're big believers in the benefits of prototyping. For Otavamedia, we tested a prototype of the service with the editors and end-users in two rounds. In the first one, we tackled the overall user experience – in the second one, we added a visual layer.

Moreover, the user interviews were conducted so that Otavamedia's representatives could also come and hear the comments straight from the users – this was seen as eye-opening. When we began the implementation of the design work, we knew exactly what we were doing with no fear of missteps.

Paywalls: consistency is key

Like many other media companies, Otavamedia had implemented paywalls for many of their sites. The problem was, the customer path was unclear and the system worked differently for each publication. We audited the paywall system for Suomen Kuvalehti and rebuilt the user experience so that it could be duplicated for every other Otavamedia magazine, too.

Buttery smooth co-operation with multiple teams

The project required us to work together with various teams: Otavamedia's Product Owner represented the voice of the editorial staff, while the technical side of things needed to be discussed with the development team from Aste. Additionally, Digitalist Group was in charge of collecting user feedback online while we conducted the face-to-face interviews. Efficient project management was the key to making all this work and reinforcing the feeling that we were all working towards the same goal.

"Taiste joined Otavamedia as a design partner to work on the overhaul of Suomen Kuvalehti. The idea was for us to learn new methods and ways to work alongside this project. The work was extremely smooth and our co-operation turned out to be very fruitful. Taiste's proactive and pragmatic approach created trust, they clearly cared about us as a customer. On top of a successful project, we picked up many things that are going to be useful in our future endeavours."

Riku Österlund

Head of Digital, Otavamedia

Other work

See all

How can we help?

No matter where you are on your digitalisation journey, we encourage you to get in touch.

Contact us

Vilma Merikanto

General inquiries

vilma.merikanto@taiste.com
+358 44 556 8459