Owela Open Web Lab
Owela (Open Web Lab)
Owela is an online space for open innovation and co-design with end users, companies and researchers. It provides social media based tools and methods for understanding users’ needs and experiences as well as designing new products and services together.
Online tools facilitate user participation in innovation and co-design activities regardless of time and place. For companies, Owela makes it possible to reach and stay connected with timely and geographically distributed users in a cost efficient way. Online collaboration is easy and fun for the users, who can participate in innovation activities whenever they have time and wherever they are.
Owela is administrated by VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, where the tool and research methods have been developed since 2007. Owela suites especially for designing digital media services that can be tested on the web, but any other products and services can be innovated and developed, as well.
Services
Owela consists of project spaces that may be used as co-design platforms from first ideas to field evaluations or in selected phases of the innovation process. Project spaces can be restricted to selected participants or open for everyone. Owela methods can be combined with face-to-face user research or utilized as a communication channel during real world living lab studies. Both quantitative and qualitative user experience and feedback can be collected.
- Consumer study – Get to know users, needs, attitudes, opinions and usage situation
- Open ideation – Get ideas for a new product or service
- Concept evaluation – Users’ reactions to new product or service concepts or prototypes
- User test feedback – Communication channel during field/online evaluation
- Co-design – Involve lead users throughout the innovation process
References
Owela has been utilized in several research projects and it has been continuously updated based on the experiences and user feedback. Examples of Owela projects:
- User-driven agile software development (ITEI project; with Movial Oy)
- Evaluation of a new web site concept (Suomi.fi by State Treasury, Finland)
- Public co-design of a multicultural web community Monimos.fi (Somus project; with Moniheli ry and the Ministry of Justice, Finland)
- Consumer study of cloud software, ideation and concept evaluation (F-Secure Oyj)
Visit Owela in http://owela.vtt.fi!
