Erik Rydell, interaction designer

ABOUT ME

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"My goal is to enhance people’s experience by applying user- centered design to products and services”

ERIK RYDELL Interaction Designer

"My goal is to enhance people’s experience by applying user- centered design to products and services”

ERIK RYDELL Interaction Designer

"My goal is to enhance people’s experience by applying user- centered design to products and services”

ERIK RYDELL Interaction Designer

"My goal is to enhance people’s experience by applying user- centered design to products and services”

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All projects are property of Erik Rydell or stated companies

ABOUT ME

About Me

I am an Industrial designer with a Master’s degree in Interaction design. My strength is seeing the big picture, I strive to fulfill the different stakeholders’ needs and requirements and I also have much experience working with detailed visual design. Depending on the project, I use different methods in my design work. Some examples are: interviewing users/ stakeholders using open-ended questions, shadowing user groups, analyzing data, visualizing ideas and concepts, creating prototypes, performing user tests and making high-end visual assets. I am a runner. I finished the Stockholm Marathon 2017 in 3:39:18. Photography is an other interest of mine. Feel free to contact me via email or phone: +46 (0)703 009 761.

Photo credit: Design-People A/S

Design- People

A redesigned interface for a saltspreader device (a body builder for trucks). Client: Epoke A/S De-icing slippery roads in wintertime is a tough job done under extreme circumstances. A redesigned control panel led to better workflow for the truck-drivers and better business for the manufacturer of salt-spreading equipment, Epoke. Read more here. My contribution to the project was to analyze a user study for improvement, I participated in a brainstorming session and I also assisted the team with visual assignments in Illustrator for the final U.I.

A redesigned icon library. Client: Kampstrup A/S Kamstrup is a world wide leading supplier within metering systems for water, electricity and distributed heating. Kamstrup are using symbols and icons throughout their products, software, documentation and marketing. Though until the beginning of 2011 there were no corporate guidelines for usability, design and use of Kamstrup's icons. Kamstrup's departments and project teams each had their "own” symbols and icons which resulted in varying design approach and finish were used for similar functions. This resulted in random user experience in different Kamstrup products and software systems. Each new icon is designed based on a corporate Kamstrup design DNA that frames the overall usability approach and look and feel. The benefits are obvious: the users experience is better thanks to a consistent naming of functions and icon design that can be used by all Kamstrup’s offices around the globe.

Photo credits: Design-People A/S & Epoke A/S

Back to Work overview

A redesigned interface for a saltspreader device (a body builder for trucks). Client: Epoke A/S. De-icing slippery roads in wintertime is a tough job done under extreme circumstances. A redesigned control panel led to better workflow for the truck-drivers and better business for the manufacturer of salt-spreading equipment, Epoke. Read more here. My contribution to the project was to analyze a user study for improvement, I participated in a brainstorming session and I also assisted the team with visual assignments in Illustrator for the final U.I.

Back to work overview

August 2009 - June 2012, Umeå, Sweden Master’s Program in Interaction Design at Umeå Institute of Design. Degree of Master of Fine Arts. August 2005 - June 2018, Umeå, SwedenBachelor Program in Industral Design at Umeå Institute of Design. Degree of Bachelor of Arts.

December 2017 - today, Stockholm, Sweden Senior Interaction Designer.

March 2015 - September 2017, Södertälje, Sweden Visual Designer at Scania, Contractor via Berge Consulting. My team was responsible for all of the visual design (digital and physical) for the trucks and buses. I primarily worked with Scania’s digital HMI "the secondary screen” which is used by the truck driver as an entertainment/ media and navigation unit, and the digital cluster. I worked on creating the digital content of these units, as well as the illumination and physical buttons on the instrument panel. I was also responsible for creating guidelines for packaging/print material, facelifts of different products, and print/graphics for Scania accessories. Many of the projects are still under development and therefore secret. The projects I worked on were executed in teams of diverse backgrounds, including interaction design, cognitive science, visual design and engineering. Together we improved the user experience of Scania’s digital and physical user interfaces.

Umeå Institute of Design

January 2007 - March 2007, Örebro, Sweden Industrial Design Trainee. Atlas Copco is a leading manufacturer of industrial tools and mining equipment. As an industrial design trainee I had the opportunity to develop many different skills that have been useful in my career. I conducted comprehensive research on various project concepts, sketched a future concept for a new mining machine, and supported the industrial design group in various tasks. I even had the opportunity to test drive one of Atlas Copco’s new mining machines, which gave me a good appreciation for their design language.

ERICSSON

October 2013 - December 2014, Munich, Germany Interaction Designer. 3M | GTG are experts in digital communications when it comes to public and corporate space solutions. In my role as an interaction designer at GTG I collaborated with the design and development teams to design the user experience for 3M’s internal information platform. This platform is used to share information with employees about ongoing events and relevant business news. I maintained data in a SQL- database, contributed to the design of the CMS U.I., as well as how the displayed content would look. I also helped 3M staff with questions during the handover period of the product. The project resulted in a CMS tool that was used to upload data to ”soffits”, i.e. roof and wall mounted screens that were located in 3M’s headquarters in Minnesota.

January 2011 - June 2011, Aarhus, Denmark Design Trainee. Design-people is a Danish consultancy company specializing in advanced interaction and product design. As a design trainee I joined several different project teams and contributed to both internal projects and client-related design assignments. Some of the projects that I was a part of include: designing an icon library for metering software, conducting user research for metering software, analysis of user tests for improvement of truck cabin touch panels, brainstorming sessions and sketching interaction design concepts for B&O and GN Netcom, creating Flash prototypes for interaction concepts for thermostats, and maintaining the Design-people website.

October 2012 - September 2013, Gothenburg, Sweden UI Designer/ Visual Designer. Euroland Investors provides a platform for its customers in the financial services industry to deliver business-critical reports and analyses to their clients. I was the only designer at Euroland throughout my employment, in which my role was to design user interfaces for Euroland’s online and iPad applications. I made wire frames, graphics and semi- interactive prototypes, all the while maintaining communication with the financial experts and developers to ensure the end product reflected the design vision.

3M | GTG

Euroland Investors

SCANIA

Atlas Copco Rock Drills AB

Design- People

Design-People

December 2017 - today, Stockhiolm, Sweden Senior Interaction Designer.

December 2017 - today, Stockholm, Sweden Senior Interaction Designer.

I worked with Scania’s digital HMI such as "the secondary screen” which is used by the truck driver as a entertainment/ media and navigation display and the digital cluster in front of the steering wheel.

Scania

My role in the Semi- Autonomus Platooning project was to make the graphics, the overall style and also animations that shows the interactions of the HMI using Adobe AfterEffects.

I was part of making the new Scania R500 (the Next Generation Scania). The projects were executed in teams and were the member’s background were in e.g. interaction design, cognitive science, visual design and engineering. I worked with Scania’s digital HMI such as "the secondary screen” which is used by the truck driver as a entertainment/ media and navigation unit and the digital cluster. I also worked with the illumination of the instrument panels screens and physical buttons.

The "secondary screen”/ entertainment and navigation unit in the cab. I have also worked with ilumination of the buttons and controls, such as the ACC/ climate panel.

I made a guideline of packaging. It is an internal guideline that is ment to be used by the visual designers at Scania and it describes how to design the boxes for Scania Accessory products regardless of the dimensions of it.

Photo credit: Scania CV AB

My role in the Semi- Autonomus Platooning project was to make the graphics, the overall style and also animations that shows the interactions of the HMI using Adobe AfterEffects.

3M | GTG

Photo credit: 3M | GTG

In my role as an interaction designer at GTG I collaborated with the design and development teams to design the user experience for 3M’s internal information platform/ community system. This platform is used to share information with employees about ongoing events and relevant business news. I maintained data in a SQL- database, contributed to the design of the CMS U.I., as well as how the displayed content would look. I also helped 3M staff with questions during the handover period of the software. The software was delivered together with a content creation and assignment guide where we described how it worked. The project resulted in a CMS tool that was used to upload data to ”soffits”, i.e. roof and wall mounted screens that were located in 3M’s headquarters in Minnesota. The CMS tool that enabled users to create and upload content on soffits that were in 3M’s headquarters. Read more here.

My job included maintanenance of the content of the soffits, improvements for the CMS- tool and assistance for the 3M staff during the handover process. I copied the text from the submitted file and took the most prominent/ characteristic from the image, logged in to the CMS- tool, where I pasted the information into the new templates which I had made the ground work for. Then the content showed up on as a slide- show on the soffits. There was different thematic layouts depending on if there was an internal event, if there was a new release on the market or from which 3M department the information came from.

3M submitted content which they wanted to be projected on the screens. I downloaded the content from the server. Here are some examples of how they could look like.

It was possible to monitor the actual content of the soffits remotely via a remote control software. Each individual "information- particle" could also cover one or plenty screens depending on the aspect ratio of the entire soffit.

3M submitted content which they wanted to be projected on the screens. I downloaded the content from the server. Here are some examples of how they could look like.

Photo credit: Erik Rydell

Euroland Investors are a third hand supplior which visualize economical statistics of the customer’s business. My role was to design user interface to iPad applications and websites. I made wire frames, graphics, prototypes and also the communication to other stakeholders. On one side I communicated with the market team who ordered the products and on the other hand the developers who implemented e.g. websites.

The Annual Report Promotion 2013 application.

I made The Annual Report Promotion 2013 application using InDesign and a plug-in called Mag Plus which enabled you to do basic interactivity such as go to a URL- link, send an e-mail and go to scenes. The app contained a glance of a few selected customers’ annual reports. The user could also order these customers’ complete annual reports on a CD via a function from the app.

Euroland Investors

Euroland Investors decided to create a website as a campaign to recruite new shareholders. I made the deisgn and in a close collaboration with implementors who put it together. I made an overall flow chart and a simple clickable prototype as a method to communicate with the implementors. I recorded the click through prototype which can be seen below.

I made The Annual Report Promotion 2012 application using InDesign and a plug-in called Mag Plus which enabled you to do basic interactivity such as go to a URL- link, send an e-mail and go to scenes. The app contained a glance of a few selected customers’ annual reports. The user could also order these customers’ complete annual reports on a CD via a function from the app.

Studies (in this case from 2010) have shown that an individual's decision to be an organ donor is more widely supported by their family when the family member knows about it in advance. In 2010 there were 160 possibiliteies for organ donation that didn’t happen due to lack of knowledge.

The project resulted in an application for 16 year old children in the school education. As a part of the physical education, the children walks around, almost like a scavenger hunt and answer questions about the organs’ role in the body. Apart from fresh air and training, the children also get the opportunity to send questions to their family members whether or not they have signed up on The Council for Organ and Tissue Donation or thought about the to become an organ donor.

I worked closely with two groups throughout the complete project. On one hand the hospital. I met with three Donor Coordinating Doctors in Sweden. (Here is a meeting with Peter Desatnik which I performed a stakeholder mapping together with). See a short video clip here. I also met with two transplanted people which had received one kidney each. I also met people in general to see how they reasoned in these questions. At least one with each backgrounds that was mentioned above tested or heard about the concepts that I developed during the process.

Master’s Thesis

I worked closely with two groups throughout the complete project. On one hand the hospital. I met with three Donor Coordinating Doctors in Sweden. (Here is a meeting with Peter Desatnik which I performed a stakeholder mapping together with). See a short video clip here.I also met with two transplanted people which had received one kidney each. I also met people in general to see how they reasoned in these questions. At least one with each backgrounds that was mentioned above tested or heard about the concepts that I developed during the process.

Master’s Thesis

I worked closely with two groups throughout the complete project. On one hand the hospital. I met with three Donor Coordinating Doctors in Sweden. (Here is a meeting with Peter Desatnik which I performed a stakeholder mapping together with). See a short video clip here.I also met with two transplanted people which had received one kidney each. I also met people in general to see how they reasoned in these questions. At least one with each backgrounds that was mentioned above tested or heard about the concepts that I developed during the process.

I performed a bounch of different research activities. I met with staff at a low vision center, I tried to go grocery shopping with googles that mimicked different visually impairments. I aslo met with a focus group that consisted of three visually impaired people. They participated in the research, ideation and evaluation process.

Bachelor’s Thesis

Shadowing visually impaired people when they were doing everyday chores and flow charts of the activity.

In my Bachelor’s Degree project I tried to make visually impaired people more independent in their daily lives by designing a hand held tool that could complement the assistant that othervise helps them around. The concept is called ”Elucimate” from the two words ”elucidate” (another word for clarify) and ”mate”.

”Elucimate”, a hand held device that has a camera, a bendable screen with high contrast and also a speech- synthesis.

The opportunities to interpret everyday information are restricted for visual handicapped people . The target group of this project is people who have the keenness of vision between moderate to serious reduced sight. One consequence of bad eye sight is among other things reduced self-esteem. The aim of this project is to develop an aid that renders possible different options to elucidate information for visually handicapped people. This degree work ended up with a product that combines speech synthesis and a magnification in a little discreet format at the same time. The speech synthesis manages to translate texts to voice recordings. The five inch wide display is meant to be used by the target group as a magnification in situations when the speech synthesis doesn’t work. One example of that kind of situation is when the user wants to clarify for instance illustrations or images which can be translated in endless of ways. Due to the difficulties of clarify those kinds of objects in a way that the user gets satisfied of the interpretation, I decided to leave it to the user’s ability to get an own opinion via looking to the bendable screen. The project also contains some complements like a grip for both left handed and right handed users.