How Nokia uses Marvel to collaborate effectively across global teams

Industry: Communication Technology
Key Feature: Collaboration
HQ: Espoo, Finland

Communications and technology company Nokia has 90,000 employees across multiple locations. With geo distributed design teams Marvel has been able to provide a platform for effective collaboration and communication as they worked to build a new design system and support product development.

The two main groups that benefit from the Marvel platform are Cloud and Network Services (CNS) and Network Infrastructure.

“The CNS team is part of the Common Software Foundation, which is an initiative to bring CNS applications together into a coherent software suite through the creation of a high performance, modular, scalable library of software infrastructure components that are used by the CNS Product Units, as a base for their innovative applications.”

“The core component UX designers work embedded with the teams on three legs of the design system, core UI widgets, mapping and charting. Our overarching design language is called FreeForm UX and it ensures the 3 areas are unified in their design principles. Approximately one quarter of our team is focused on core components design. The remaining designers work partially embedded in priority product design teams supporting ongoing feature design, prototyping and all UX design activities.”

“We have just released a new version of our design system where Marvel helped greatly with the foundational work for our demo site and design library. Marvel helped with delivery improvements such as fully integrated usage guidance, introduction of theming and tokenization, improved icon library and support for right to left languages from the Middle East.”

The teams working with Marvel have seen innovations in their products and services having adopted Design Thinking methodologies but design as a function is gaining maturity internally. “We’ve made great progress in evangelizing the value of design by using a UX centric approach; we've created world class experiences while at the stage where design is important but receives little funding.”

A key goal for the team is to build a culture of Design Thinking and experimentation throughout the customer journey. Having already seen an effective R&D and lower cost of services and care, this strengthens the value of design within a software business.

With a high developer to design ratio and a UX design team spread across India, Canada, Portugal, Bulgaria and Finland, collaboration and communication within Marvel has proven to be integral throughout the design process.

“Links are shared with the application teams and users can review prototypes when convenient. Commenting workflow allows designers to track open and completed questions/suggestions in each of the prototypes. Specific users can be tagged in the comments ensuring they will see items important to them. Marvel has proved to be an integral part and aids in communicating with stakeholders spread across the globe.”

Even throughout recent changes to remote working, Nokia has been able to continue with very little disruption while collaborating on design ideas across the company. In particular Marvel’s remote User Testing tools has been able to provide support to decision making and approval from stakeholders.

“During the research phase of our design process, we have leveraged Marvel User Testing in conjunction with moderated remote concept testing and usability testing to generate heat maps and statistics for users’ interactions with the GUI. This has helped to provide some supporting information for our user tests. Using Marvel’s precise recording of interface activity, we have been able to more accurately defend design decisions around navigation patterns for some applications.”

As well as functionality, Marvel provides a partnership with Enterprise customers like Nokia, in order to get the most out of our platform. This includes a dedicated Customer Success Manager, training and resources to suit each customer.

“We have a very open and ongoing dialog with Marvel. Our account rep is almost an extension of our team, she is a partner in helping us to solve problems we encounter and is willing to discuss any feature requests. We maintain regular status meetings to keep both parties informed of the latest developments in our workflows.”

Thanks to Marvel’s platform and partnership the Nokia team have been able to work more closely within their teams aiding in their development of innovative products and strengthening their culture of design.