• Role: Product Designer - Frontend development
• Skills used: HTML - CSS – JSON - Javascript - Sketch

WIP is a well renowned software house focused since the mid 90s on software for various mobile devices. They made the first SMS sent in Sweden possible and if you ever used Swedbanks mobile app in the 2010s, yes, that's was a WIP product. Anyhow, I joined them in the midst of things when things were really heating up in the mobile business. I designed mainly for a few specific types of products we sold and i have categorized them as such here. We made apps for hockey teams, tools for company boards, salestools and banking apps, just to name a few!

Tourism apps

One of the sucessful categories of apps we sold was for tourist destinations, in Norway in particular, for reasons i have now forgotten... I designed it so we had an empty shell, a destination template that could be used for any destination without making it from scratch each time, more or less wich also meant we could lower the prices. It was a very popular product, although it wasn't as "plug and play" as I had wished from the beginning.

This was the first version of the tourism app i designed in 2010. It had a very common layout for mobile apps at it's time, a start screen with some info but otherwise everything was hidden behind menues.

This was the latest revision of the design i made of the tourism app while working at WIP. It had a more modern layout that displayed most wanted information directly on the front page without having to dive into menues. There was also a stationary kiosk screen version used at tourism info centers. This was the most popular version and we sold many of these around the world.

Event apps

Event apps started to get serious traction around 2013-2014 and we were on from very early on with a quite unique in-house developed system called Dynapp that allowed dynamic content to be changed to the app on the fly. Nothing strange these days, but back then this was not common, most apps still had static content so this gave us a huge upper hand when it came to these sort of apps where the customer wanted to update information frequently. It was also one of the most popular app we sold and we worked with pretty much all of the big ones, Sandvik, Volvo, SAS etc. On these projects i often worked together with a designer from the customer to dial the design in just right.

Boardbook

The Boardbook was a tool specifically aimed at board members to securely handle sharepoint documents. There was a call for higher document security from organisations around the world at the time, but there was not much on the market that could deliver on this, but Boardbook had AES-256 encryption and was considered very safe. Flat design hade started to be the thing at this point and I designed it as such. This example in particular was for the company Skandia.

Hockey apps

The sports team apps were a huge. I have always been completely uninterested in watching or following sports, so this was a very interesting project for me as a designer to solve. I went to hockey games, something i had never done before. Talked to fans, trying to really understand them what they wanted. With the Dynapp software we had developed that allowed for changeing information on the fly, this made it perfect for information intesive applications – like sports apps. Again, at the time most apps were quite static, but here we offered something very different. This made the product very popular with the sports teams! We had pretty much all of the teams of Hockeyallsvenskan and Swedish Hockey League as customers at this time.

(Left and middle) Växjö Lakers (Right) KHK

Conclusion

My years at WIP were among the most productive and enjoyable in my career so far. It was right at the heart of the mobile app era, when everything felt new and possible — and when it wasn’t, we found a way to make it possible. All of this was achieved together with one of the smallest and most dedicated teams I’ve ever worked with.