Summary
How do you create the conditions for delivering a great customer experience on a rapidly changing platform? In 2016, Norway’s national railway company began building a new technology platform. As designers, we yearned to address the customer’s actual needs and desires, not just a fresh look and technical upgrade. But with no process, principles, tools, or internal design resources, where do you start?
Key Insights
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Privatization of Norway’s railways forced MSB to relinquish core IT assets, challenging design teams to deliver digital services without full system control.
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MSB’s designers initially faced pressure to replicate an old user experience, despite technical backend changes requiring significant redesign.
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Users often resist change because they trust familiar interfaces, equating stability with reliability rather than prioritizing modern design.
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Introducing ‘waves’—value-focused releases—helped bridge designers’ need for exploration and developers’ need for speed.
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Google Design Sprints proved effective for cross-functional alignment and rapid, inclusive ideation despite tight deadlines.
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Simple, lightweight feedback mechanisms like in-app buttons and Trello boards can generate rich user insights if effectively managed.
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Opening user feedback channels to the entire product team fosters ownership and encourages developers to solve user problems proactively.
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Ecological validity in research—testing in realistic user contexts—is critical to understanding the true impact of product changes.
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Continuous design requires balancing the company’s long-term vision with short-term iterative delivery and frequent learning loops.
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The key challenge is not integrating design into agile, but enabling designers and developers to collaboratively create excellent user experiences through appropriate processes.
Notable Quotes
"We were told, can you please make the user experience exactly the same a year from now."
"Our users like their old house—they don’t necessarily want to learn something new, they want trust and familiarity."
"Designers felt like hamsters on a wheel, always reacting and never able to explore or refine ideas."
"A wave is really just a sprint but defined by the outcome we want to achieve, not just a time frame."
"Google Design Sprint is the best inception strategy I know for design thinking because you learn without thinking about learning."
"Opening the feedback board to the whole team made developers feel responsible and inspired to solve user needs."
"What users say they want and what they really need can be very different; you need to be careful about how you interpret feedback."
"When you do a release, you’re really saying, here’s what I’m thinking: how does this work in your world?"
"We need processes that accommodate design instead of designers becoming the hamster in the agile wheel."
"One eye on the horizon and the other on the next wave—that's the perspective product teams need to deliver quality digital products."
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