SG Mark 2022 Winner’s Spotlight

1. How has the SG Mark benefited you and your team?

Kris+ is Singapore Airlines’ lifestyle rewards app designed to engage customers during their daily lives, even when they do not fly. 

Kris+ combines miles, rewards, discount privileges and payments into a single app; allowing app users and KrisFlyer members to complete payment and earn miles instantly in a single step. 

With over 1,500 dining, retail, and activities partner outlets across Singapore, users are never lacking opportunities to utilise the app. 

Besides transacting at partner outlets, we offer users the highest miles earn rates across a range of lifestyle activities such as purchasing of dining e-vouchers, making dining reservations, and even taxi bookings. By integrating ‘KrisShop’, a premium omnichannel retailer platform by Singapore Airlines, this has brought more ways for our users to continue their inflight and on-the-ground shopping experience. 

Getting awarded the SG Mark is a testament of our team’s hard work and commitment in building such features while designing with users in mind. The award has inspired us to push ourselves further to enhance the Kris+ app experience to better serve our users. 

2. What was the most difficult moment when developing the idea?  

To build the Kris+ lifestyle ecosystem, time-to-market is critical yet challenging. Hence, we formed cross-functional teams to collaborate and innovate such that features are launched in a timely manner. In addition, offerings such as privileges and deals in Kris+ must satisfy our users’ ever-changing preferences. This requires us to source and select not only the right partners who are relevant to our users, but also like-minded ones to work closely with us. 

On the technical front, Kris+ has been an early adopter of blockchain technology. At the stage of idea development, blockchain as an enterprise solution was unheard of as it was typically associated with the crypto market. However, we saw the opportunity that tokenisation is well-suited for miles-based transactions, especially for security and efficiency. 

Hence without any reference, we had to pioneer our way to utilise this capability. Now, Kris+ operates on a private consortium blockchain using Proof of Authority (POA). This also consumes less energy and computing power compared to typical Proof of Work (POW) blockchain transactions which are usually power-hungry.

3. What are some new things your team learned about the users during the process of research and designing? 

When doing research or designing an idea, we try to gather as much user feedback as we can to gauge the usability and underlying pain points. Besides the user experience (UX) aspects, we do see the rise in user expectations towards a well-executed user interface (UI) to support the functionality of the app. 

During the COVID-19 times, digital means were the go-to for daily chores and activities. Now, people have become more digital savvy and are more willing to try out different platforms and technology. This means that we need to be always prepared to access and make changes according to our users’ needs and preferences.  

Furthermore, we have users who are seasoned travellers. As we run on agile, we prioritise feature requirements with different stakeholders and launch it as an MVP. This leads to the question of ‘what does an MVP looks like’ in our context, and how we can satisfy this group of users who are used to the full Singapore Airlines experience which is not the typical experience that MVP delivers. 

4. What are your team’s future plans?  

Besides Singapore, partner discounts and privileges across the world are being progressively added to the Kris+ app. We will continue the expansion of overseas markets where Singapore Airlines has strong user base and presence.  

Ultimately, we will always strive to make the Kris+ app ever relevant to our users, such that it caters to their daily lifestyle needs. 

1. How has the SG Mark benefited you?

SG Mark is organised by Design Business Chamber Singapore (DBCS), and it delivers a strong message on how design make impact on business growth. 

Receiving SG Mark has helped endorsed CaaS brand as design service quality, and design is not just a beautiful face on top of the service, but deeply integrated with service quality.

2. How do you think your design has impacted users?

• Understand park info / plan / buy / app wallet
• Recommended itineraries are designed to helped organisers of the trip to plan ahead for various needs of friends and family (e.g. family with young kid, teenagers, elders)
• For certain rides or entertainment, age, height and physical fitness might be required. We have prompted those information ahead of time to avoid disappoint to the attraction
• Users with time constraints need to get around efficiently for more attractions

Parents need to plan and re-plan spontaneously base on nap time or any other children’s need. Dealing with surprises, e.g. queue is 2-hours long upon arrival

3.  What was the most difficult moment when developing your idea?

The most difficult moment was understand the park guest needs (Empathy for guest / customers ) and translate into design is always challenging.  We have carefully crafted the project plan to ensure the goal can be accomplished:

– Interviewed Ocean Park guests on their trip planning and in-park and
after trip experience ( Before, during and after experience)

– Shadowed various groups of guest to understand their needs, queries
and inconvenient moment when they are visiting the park. Our
researchers spent 2 – 4 hours under sun or rain with each group of the
guest in order to get the essence of their experience.

– We have invited Ocean Park staff members (clients from various
department and level) to come work as one team to participate in
some of the guest interviews , to ensure cross team participate in
the Empathy process.

– A core team is formed to help manage and facilitate the whole design
process to keep cross department in the loop in the digital
transformation of Smart Park experience.

4. What are some new things you learned about yourself and the users as you were designing?

• Ourselves: Empathy Research and service design as part is one of the key elements that helps drive the success of the Digital Design for this project with cross team.  When we first approaching the client with full Design Thinking approach, we were not sure if we can get the senior Directors buy in.  We are happy with the collaboration with Ocean Park in the process.
  
• Guests:  Enjoying good times with friends and family at Ocean Park is the prime of the experience. We carefully design the digital experience to assist the guest to navigate around and provide assistance and it is not the prime itself

4. What are your future plans?

CaaS continues to believe user research and service design are fundamental elements that helps drive the success of the Digital Design.  We will continue to focus on supporting clients in building digital strategies, and provide learning programs to help our clients training their team to deliver exemplify digital experience.

5.  What was the inspiration behind your product/design/idea?

Users need is always the key for design. We cannot stop advocating the importance of looking into both qualitative and quantitative data for digital design. At early stage, we have identified the design should not be measured purely digital about download right, but how well it assist the guests to understand the park experience, plan and assist them to navigate for the best experience as our goal.

6. Did you experience designer’s block during your work process?

Truly integrating the digital experience with Park traveling experience is indeed more complicates than a merely digital business.  Technical challenges with other technical partners occurs and some of the original ideas may not be able to be triaged to future versions.

7. How do you unwind after the grind?

Although we love theme parks, our researcher may want to take a short break before going back to visit again after touring with guest every day for a month. 

1. How has the SG Mark benefited you?

Attaining the SG Mark has been a great encouragement for the team. It acknowledges and validates the rigorous attention and hours we’ve put in and spurs us to continue expanding the possibilities of what design can do. On a personal note, it’s been rewarding to be recognized for a public piece of work — as what we do is sometimes behind the scenes!

2. How do you think your design has impacted users?

One of our goals in revamping the two digital channels was to enable users to make better-informed decisions with ease, as well as provide a more delightful experience. I believe we were able to accomplish that through a combination of visual design and interaction design, resulting in a fresh look on top of recalibrated structures and simpler flows through the platforms. Users should now have less mental load when performing essential account actions, and content prioritizes their needs in context of where they are.

3. What was the most difficult moment when developing your idea?

Creating a new experience for a complex service that has been serving millions while ensuring that it is intuitive and familiar was the biggest challenge for our team. We definitely didn’t nail it on our first try and had many iterations before landing on our final design. It didn’t help that we were doing this project during the peak of the pandemic across multiple time zones and languages!

4. What are some new things you learned about yourself and the users as you were designing?

I became increasingly aware of my biases as a designer. At times, I would apply my own understanding and experience as a telco user to arrive at design decisions. I’ve learnt to constantly check my biases with my teammates and through testing with users to ensure that the final output is universal and accessible.

The process of testing our designs has also made me realise how unpredictable users can be! Some things that seem intuitive to one group might appear inaccessible to others. It’s so important to understand users’ mental models in context.

5. What are your future plans?

I hope to continue deepening my skills and practicing design to serve the needs of people, on projects both big and small!

6. What was the inspiration behind your product/design/idea?

For the website, the team took inspiration from direct competitors as well as indirect competitors (i.e. platforms where people spend the most time every day, such as social media platforms, banking platforms, e-commerce platforms, etc).

For the app, one inspiration was Apple’s Fitness visualizations in the form of rings. Telco packages in Indonesia can get very complex with many granular data categories. The use of the rings helps to elegantly fit more importantinformation about their data usage in one place using a familiar visual concept that can be understood at a glance.

7. Did you experience designer’s block during your work process?

Of course! Balancing user needs, technical feasibility and value for business can be rather challenging and even frustrating at times. Nonetheless, these “boundaries” have pushed our team and myself personally to design more interesting ideas.

8. How do you unwind after the grind?

Drinks after work, working out, and going down many rabbit holes on YouTube.

_{We are so grateful to our amazing team of designers who worked together to create our Life in a Year book and Celebration Kit: Prof. Kris, Xin Yan, Adya, Amanda, Sabrina, Justin, Jeanette, Siska, Angelina, Joyce, Lorraine. A special thanks to our partners, Lien Foundation and Ang Chin Moh Foundation, for their support and contribution to this project.}

1.      What was the most difficult moment when developing your idea?

Defining the initial concept and direction is critical in getting the rest of the design process to flow. It’s arguably the most challenging moment when facing a blank sheet of paper and the immense responsibility of creating the concept.

When designing robots, it’s often easiest to apply an anthropomorphic, zoomorphic or machine-like form.

I believe that robots should not be caricatures of living things but possess a form representative of their purpose while still truly coming alive.

It was definitely a huge challenge to develop a design concept that is purposeful and representative of the product function while being interactive with an emotional appeal.

2.      What are some new things you learned about yourself and the users as you were designing?

As with every challenging project and experience, I definitely discovered new capabilities and stretched limits within myself.

New challenges always elicit new thought processes or problem-solving methods that come up intuitively as response. I find that these are actually revisited time and again in future as additional tools in my designer’s toolbox.

With this design, I also saw first-hand just how impactful the aesthetic of a product can be to users, especially for the first impression.

In order to establish it as a function with higher business value, designers have been encouraged to prioritise capabilities in problem-solving, strategy and user-centricity. Sometimes we forget to design for beauty.

Seeing the reactions of wonder, delight, and amazement in users who saw the robot for the first time, enabling a highly positive starting engagement with the product, was truly rewarding.

3.      What are your future plans?

I believe that robots in human environments are going to become more capable, integrated and relevant in the near future, due to the recent technology becoming more readily available (e.g., 5G, machine learning, computer vision)

More and more robots are going to be deployed in the spaces we live in, and they will be more intelligent and sensitive to their environments.

Design is going to have a very vital role to play in this. While sensors inform the robot and AI powers its decision making, design needs to be there to bridge the interaction between human and robot – as it has for decades in the form of HMI.

While UI/UX design is already established as the most widespread and recent form of designing human-machine interfaces, human-robot interaction will take it one step further.

Design enables robots to communicate beyond words and graphics on a screen; through form, motion, audio-visual expression and more, facilitating intuitive deployment, trust, companionship, and collaborative work.

1. What was the most difficult moment when developing your idea?

One of the issues about conventional pillows is the inability to wash them. We spent an average of 8 hours sleeping on our pillow. Overtime, dirt and oil start to build up. Even though the pillow case is washable, the dirts can cause bacteria in the pillow.

As I am hygiene conscious, I was adamant to design my pillow to be able to clean easily. It took many years of research, redesigning, and users testing to come up with a fully-machine washable pillow that protects the filling cushions from sweat, dust and germs. 

2. What are some new things you learned about yourself and the users as you were designing?

I realised that a one-size pillow cannot fit everyone. Each individual has a unique body shape, size and preferred sleeping position. I see the need for the pillow to fit an individual and not the other way round.

To better understand how to get a good night’s sleep, I was mentored by a Taiwanese chirporactor, Mr Zheng Yunlong to identify the right pillow to use to correct sleep posture. Through these five year of learnings and experiences, the Mpillow was finally made. 

3. What are your future plans?

We are looking to increase our online presence to create awareness and education about the importance of sleep and how our customisable Mpillow can help others to achieve that. We noticed younger people are also facing sleeping problems and being on social media and e-commerce platforms give us the opportunity to reach out to them.

Being online also extend our presence beyond Singapore as we are looking to take the expanding our business to other countries such as Malaysia. 

4. What was the inspiration behind your product/design/idea?

Our journey began in 2016, when Darren suffered from chronic neck pain due to ill-fitting pillows. Despite trying every pillow that promised good neck and head support, nothing worked.

Feeling frustrated and eager for a restful sleep, Darren tapped on his experience and training as an engineer to design, sculpt and stitch together a pillow to give the right support. After many months of trial and error, he finally had his first good night’s sleep. Importantly, his self-crafted pillow with its unique “M” shape eliminated his neck and shoulder pain.

Delighted with his creation, Darren shared Mpillow with family and friends. After receiving good reviews from them, he realised that his pillow can help others who were suffering from neck and shoulder pain. Determined to help fellow pain sufferers, Darren decided to make the Mpillow available to everyone who needs it.

5. How has the SG Mark benefited you?

As the winner of the SG Mark, it has helped to boost the brand credibility of Mpillow to our customers and made our team very proud. The award also reflects us as a proud Singapore company that leverages on design and innovation to increase value in our product offerings. 

6. How do you think your design has impacted users?

Most of our customers who come to us experienced difficulty in sleeping due to neck pain, headaches and other problems. This is due to the lack of pillow options to fit their unique body build and their sleeping preferences. The Mpillow is designed to solve these problems with our patented “M” design. Our customised pillows help our customers sleep comfortably by providing them the right support to fulfill a better night’s sleep. 

7. Did you experience designer’s block during your work process?

I believe most designers can agree with me. Sometimes, I would find myself revisiting the same issue and that’s when I know I have to take a proactive approach. I would take a step back, before revisiting it to see if I can spot any solutions with a fresher perspective. It also helps for me to discuss it with my team and get some ideas from them. 

8. How do you unwind after the grind?

I enjoy taking long walks and surround myself with nature. I unwind by playing the guitar and sometimes I get some inspiration from it. I also like hanging out with my friends to explore my surroundings for inspiration.

1. What was the most difficult moment when developing your idea?

We have experienced many challenges in the past few years because of the exponential growth our business has undergone. The most difficult part is to find the right team to work with.

2. What are some new things you learned about yourself and the users as you were designing?

A lot of new things have been learnt, especially when we were conducting user studies. For instance, our hand sanitiser was not designed to just be a sanitser as upon conducting more user studies, we have found out that by housing it in such a way, the act of using the hand sanitiser becomes a lot more enjoyable as an experience.

3. What are your future plans?

We plan on expanding our range in our current category by possibly collaborating with other designers to elevate the design experience in the category, as well as innovating more products to expand our product line. We also plan on expanding our brand reach to overseas market to gain further awareness and exposure, while allowing even more people to enjoy.

4. What was the inspiration behind your product/design/idea?

The inspiration behind this was to not only bring a hand sanitiser that is safe for the skin and environment but also to look beautiful and elegant. The AOz Premium Hand Sanitiser was developed to revolutionise the way we sanitise our hands, having it housed in a beautiful spray bottle. This too encourages one to bring around a hand sanitiser with them when they go out.

Innovative elements such as the twistable spray body, streamlined packaging and elegant colors have been incorporated to create a beautiful and functional design that is perfect for a hand sanitiser.

5. Did you experience designer’s block during your work process?

There were a couple of times where we felt we were stuck and was not sure how to move forward. However, this was usually because we hit a barrier and needed to decide whether to go over it or continue on our paths. But we always find a way to solve it when we are stuck in such situations.

The biggest challenge for us was to create a product that has both skin health benefits for the user and convenience for the user at the same time. A lot of hand sanitisers are usually harsh on your hands and I wanted to avoid that from happening. We wanted to create something that would be skin friendly but at the same time, still effective. Hence, we were ecstatic to know along our design journey that the product we have created just a year ago, the AOz Ozonated Olive Oil was the perfect ingredient to infuse into our sanitisers as it contained a plethora of moisturising and skin oriented benefits.

6. How do you unwind after the grind?

I would usually make myself a nice cup of pour-over coffee after a long grind. Fortunately or unfortunately, coffee makes me feel more relaxed and sleepier instead of being more focused. Hence the act of hand-grinding a fresh bag of beans and pouring that fresh cup of coffee has always been therapeutic for me, perfect to end off the day.

7. How do you think your design of the AOz Premium Hand Sanitiser has impacted users?

We’ve realised that the element of hygiene has become a lot more prevalent due to COVID-19. However, they come at the cost of your skin’s health due to the drying effects of most common hand sanitisers. Hence we have designed one where it effectively sanitises and moisturises, while leaving a nice subtle fragrant without the risk of dry skin or sticky residue. Furthermore, it is housed in a small, fashionable spray bottle that is resistant to leaks.

1. How has the SG Mark benefited you?

It is a mark of confidence in our design, and it assures current and future clients of the quality we bring to the table.

2. How do you think your design has impacted users?

DHL MEA IC is a mobile travelling exhibition, and we hope that it would bring across the idea that DHL is a company that can move mountains to deliver a memorable experience for their customers.

3. What was the most difficult moment when developing your idea?

DHL has a long history and a ton of content, it was really challenging to sift through all the information provided to try and get to the soul of the exhibition. We had to understand everything and boil it down to make sure the content and design were in sync and to create an engaging experience for our users.

4. What are some new things you learned about yourself and the users as you were designing?

I learnt that putting yourself in the client’s shoes is very important when producing any design, to align to the client’s needs. This has helped the team avoid conflict and build a working relationship with the client, leading to a very smooth working process indeed!

5. What are your future plans?

We hope to continue our fruitful partnership with DHL, not only designing and building more Innovation Centres, but together, exploring more opportunities with the many solutions and services they are a part of.

6. What was the inspiration behind your product/design/idea?

What inspired us was the mobility of the client; DHL is a company that is famed for logistical efficiency and for their ability to reach consumers worldwide and we decided that the Innovation Centre should as well!

7. Did you experience designer’s block during your work process?

Of course! Any designer would at some point. It feels as if your client is a stranger to you, even if we have worked together for many years. I learnt that when this happens, it’s always useful to go back to the brief, to retrace your steps and you will eventually find your way back to the right path.

8. How do you unwind after the grind?

I like boxing! Sweat out the stress.