One did it launch!

One did it team has launched a new version of the One did it website. It offers ecological backpack test to estimate what is your annual consumption of natural resources. The test provides questions in different categories as before, but now with more question for registered members. This means you can make your test even more accurate!

There is more to come, naturally. The team is working on to add more features to the site, amongst them eco-tips, Dos, to lighten the ecological backpack. I mean, what is the use of knowing the weight of the eco-backpack if you don’t know how to lighten it. Stay tuned for this and many other interesting features.

One did it believes that the consumption of natural resources (input) is somewhat easier to measure and plan than trying to clean up waste or pollution (output) the consumption creates. Of course, taking care of both the input and output is important. But we still believe that there is a need for preventive approach with ecological issues. We also believe that this could be a groundbreaking change in our minds if we could take this type of thinking to our everyday life. It doesn’t mean we need to move to a forest and start living out of hunting and berry picking (although that might be fun…). If we just take small steps at the time and open our minds to the idea of decreasing consumption the ways we find comfortable in our own lives. One did it is a service that wants to support that type of thinking. We hope you like it and share your thoughts with us via feedback form at the website.

We would like to thank all the beta testers who shared their experiences since the first launch of One did it in summer 2008. Your comments helped us a lot!

Now, enjoy the excitement of waiting for Christmas and check out One did it for your eco-friendly satisfaction.

PS.
One did it offers also a Christmas calendar to help you to make your Christmas full of love and tenderness. It is a tiny little bit different Christmas with eco-friendly tip for each day before the Santa arrives. Every day, there is a raffle of neat backpack designed specifically for One did it and made out of recycled materials.

Did it in Helsinki – experiences of a stay at home holiday

About two weeks ago I was attending an interesting seminar organised by the Finnish Environment Institute about the preliminary results of the ENVIMAT research project concentrating on environmental impacts of material flows in the Finnish economy. The program was interesting and I was feeling light since I knew that the next Monday I would start my one week autumn holiday. While focusing on the last presentation I got an SMS from my spouse. “My passport is still stuck at the embassy because of the visa application. Seems like we can’t travel anywhere next week”.

Last time we had holiday, we took a trip through parts of Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand. I must admit that travelling is one of my passions and I take every chance to travel to faraway places. I’m not sure if that is anything to proud of these days, but still. Well, to get back to the point, this time we had planned to take a short trip from Helsinki to Tallinn. I was feeling good about our choice to this time only take a short boat trip over the Gulf of Finland, no long haul flights or extensive road trips needed. But after receiving the SMS I was disappointed, no travelling at all? What can you do with a stay at home holiday?

At the end of the week I was glad how things turned out. I had enjoyed a slow paced delicious breakfast at the Cafe Ekberg (I must admit that I couldn’t strictly stick to the vegan diet...), wandered around a park covered with yellow and red autumn leaves, walked along some narrow streets in Kaivopuisto with fancy embassy buildings next to the sidewalks. One evening, I was glad I didn’t have to feel guilty about having a Nepalese meal without being in Kathmandu. When travelling abroad I consider it almost a crime to skip the local dishes but since I was at home I could eat whatever I wanted! Another night I had a chance to listen one of my favourite artists Jukka Poika singing his stories about the down to earth life in reggae style. It’s not that often you can enjoy listening to him on the beaches of Thailand.

When travelling abroad I always spend some time shopping, now that I knew all the same shopping facilities are available when actually needed I chose do something else instead. It might sound naive but it is true that instead of shopping I spend some time in the library, museum, enjoying live music and helping a friend with her garden work. Last but not least I went to check the cows grazing on the fields of the agricultural department of the Helsinki University. I was laughing at myself since apparently I had to move to the capital city of Finland before I actually had a chance to get so close with those lovely creatures.

In addition to the fact that I had cycled more than 200 kilometres around Helsinki during my week off, I was very much surprised how relaxing time I had. I won’t make a promise not to ever again to make a long haul trip but what I learned is that spending a holiday at home eases the pressure to do too many things during your days off. Last time I needed few days to actually recover from our holiday trip before getting back to work! This time it was easy to take it slow with the activities, if I won’t have the time to visit the National museum today I can (in theory at least) do it next weekend.

Winners of MindTrek Startup Launchpad

The first-ever Startup Launchpad competition was held 9.10.2008 at Mindtrek conference in Tampere, Finland. One did it was one of the eight startup finalists pitching their idea to a group of experienced jury. The other finalists were Floobs, HammerKit, MahShelf, RunToShop, Star Wreck Studios, and TripSay.

The jury was headed by Sharon C. Ballard, the founding President/CEO of Enable Ventures Inc. Other members were Marc Davis, Social Media Guru and Chief Scientist, Yahoo!; Tapio Siik, Partner, Nokia Growth Partners; Pekka Pärnänen, Head of Finpro, Silicon Valley, and Henri Rantalainen, CEO, Business Development Advisor, Technopolis Ventures Professia.

Every contestant had 6 minutes to present the idea and company to the jury and after that anybody could make questions to the presenter. Our CEO Antti Villanen had his turn on fourth place and told about One did it in a nutshell. The jury seemed interested and asked a lot about MIPS calculation and how our service differentiates from i.e. Yahoo! Green. I think it went very well, the guy sitting next to me in the audience even congratulated me after Antti's presentation.

After couple of hours the jury had made their decision, and they commented briefly to all the contestants. The host was honored to announce the winners and he started to call out the winners. He said that the three contestants ended up a draw on the third place and he asked MacShelf, Hammerkit and One did it to come to front. At that point I have to admit I was a little bit disappointed, our final standing seemed to be something between 3rd to 5th. But after that the host started to thank everyone in the jury, the competitors and the audience, and this was it for this year. After a little bit of confusion it cleared out that there wasn't going to be more winners, the first ever MindTrek Startup Launchpad winner couldn't be selected from there three and we all were winners.

In this situation the winners will take a draw for the prizes later, but we got a chance to choose one member of the jury to give one-on-one time for us right after the event. We chose Yahoo!'s Marc Davis, and got into a really encouraging conversation with him. He was really excited about our concept and gave as hints to succeed with it. What a great day it was!

Quality life

One did it team is in intensive working period to bring the next, exciting launch of the website. As I write this, I hear our technical people go trough the service, new features and improvements. The place is filled with notes, pictures, sounds of clicking and typing. But sometimes it’s nice to get out from the office and participate events related to our project.

Marja and Mari participated in Megapolis2023 festival in Helsinki. Megapolis is an annual event and it emphasises the cities as a frontier of ecological lifestyle. This year’s theme of Megapolis was happiness. How people can live happily in the cities? Amongst many interesting speakers was Carl Honore, author of the book In Praise of Slowness. How a Worldwide Movement is Challening the Cult of Speed. Now, I am a person who likes to give time to thinking. Some people may think that I’m just slow or lazy when I look out from the window and think. But Honore finally gave me the best excuse to do this in peace. He preaches about quality of life versus the speed of our life. We have fast food, speed yoga, drive trough funerals and we speed read the bedtime stories to our children. Why everything needs to be so speedy, he asks. He doesn’t mean that we all have to start doing things slowly right away, but that we should consider doing things in right speed for us. For example, why we all need to go to work at the same time? Or why do we always need to be available via e-mail or mobile? Why can’t we give the full attention to a person we are talking with?

Okay, what does this all have to do with One did it you might ask. I think it is essential. If you consider speed, it many times relates to ecological impacts. If we want to travel fast, we choose the airplane or car instead of i.e. train or bicycle. If we want our laundry dry fast, we put them to thumble dryer instead of letting the clothes dry slowly. If our shoes gets broken, it takes time to repair them and we often choose to just quickly buy new ones. All those things are more eco-efficient when done slowly.

I think good quality lifestyle is in the core of One did it. People often suppose that being eco-efficient means also that you have to give up some good things in your life. This depends on the perspective. Giving up speed or doing things in right speed doesn’t mean that we have to give up something. It is about gaining something more: time for our loved ones and for ourselves. Eco-efficient lifestyle emphasises quality over quantity.

Raising users

Instead of doing what I am supposed to be doing - sweating my ass off with the UI development - I decided to take a break and write my first post.

Let me begin with a disclaimer:

What I am about to present you struck me when I was trying to make our firstborn go back to bed rather than go "GÄK!" all over the place five o'clock in the morning. Therefore it might also take me few curves here and there to hit the sweet spot. Bare with me.

Now, as a responsible parent of a nine months old boy I have (of course) been reading a book or two about how to raise children (how else on earth would you know how to?). In one of the books the philosophy is based on an idea of a circle that surrounds and defines home. This circle is naturally forged together by addressing both affection and boundaries to the child. Parent's job is to make sure the child is forced outside the confinement of this circle as rarely as possible. As the child grows the circle is broadened on par with the child's capabilities to interact with the world by giving her more responsibility. Basic pedagogy stuff.

May I present you with an example from the book.

A mother is planning to go outside with his three year old daughter. For no apparent reason, the daughter refuses with all her might just as a child of that age might do. In such situations the parent should not give in, but rather dress the child and carry her outside no matter how loud she might scream?

Why? Why not give your daughter (and yourself) some slack and stay inside?

That is because the child seeks her mother’s leaderships. In fact, she craves for it. Giving the child control over whether or not to go out for a bit of fresh air puts her into the throne of the decision maker. If the mother gives in, that means the daughter should take responsibility of the course of events carried during the day - something that she naturally is not capable of yet doing.
Denying the choice to stay in presents the daughter the leadership she is looking for and will eventually make her emotionally attached to the parent. This is essential for both the child's inner development and to the healthy relationship of the two.

As much as allegories often "suck ass sideways" (as my colleague Huima might put it), I am willing to take the risk and present you with one:

Let's imagine our end user as a toddler who has just learned how to walk. This is not to make mockery of the capabilities of the end user. On a site a link is a link and a button is a button. No education required. Rather it is to say that once a new user comes to the site he is totally new to the inner concepts of the developers might have. Naturally these inner concepts must be communicated to the user. I'd say in the terms of the Internet, most of that must happen within the first 30 seconds.

Of course the user already sits on the throne, for he controls the browser. And he is the king or queen when the browser is within the boundaries of his or her kingdom (sorry for another piece-of-junk allegory).

Yet we must acknowledge that coming to a new service the end user seeks the site’s (or the development team's) leadership. Therefore, when providing services, hold the users hand from the get-go. Do not make her choose between tons of features. Show her what it's all about. After that the circle can be broadened. And later even more. This naturally goes with both the visual and the structural design.

...

Have you ever heard anyone saying the following:

"Like this could be linked to that and that could be linked to this and this could be embedded into that and then the user could have the option to either do it this way and or this way. And then every user could customize the way their ..."

By doing feature-bloated design we of course try to cater all the different use cases we can think of. At the same time we diminish or ability to speak to our audience, who probably didn't come for tons of different things and would feel much more safe if it resolved just one issue for them. Yes, you heard me: safer.

By safer I mean that our user is able to decice within few minutes whether or not the service has any value to him and if so - store it in a safe place, a cardboard box on the upper shelf of his mind waiting to be opened again if need be. Or in toddler-terms:

"Banging a wooden duck against a radiator seems fun. I just store this duck here on the floor until the next time I feel like driving the neighbourhood nuts."

In terms of UI design, "keeping it simple" doesn’t give enlightenment to anyone, right? Yet over the years of developing sites and services I feel this is something that cannot be stressed enough.
When digging head deep down in the mud during the development phase it is just too easy to get carried away with all the concepts and features and gadgets and whatnot. Keep reminding yourself that you with all your knowledge of the concept differ very drastically from the average user. Then do that again. Good.

Somehow I am inclined to feel that the situation has not been getting better over the years, either. With the emergence of RSS, gadgets and all the different APIs, it seems that nowadays everything can be everywhere (or anything). Take Plaxo for example.

I am mostly connected to same people in Facebook, LinkedIn and Plaxo. Naturally I have most contacts in Facebook, but I am connected to all of my Plaxo contacts also in the other two. What's the use of that? Shouldn't one or two – one for private contacts and one for business matters – suffice? When I originally signed into Plaxo it was advertised to me as a way to backup and share contact data (phone numbers, mail adresses etc.) online. Nothing more. Since, it has bloated into sort of wannabe-facebook-esque thing with all it's photo sharing capabilities, and now I am not sure what issue it should resolve for me. If they'd kept sharpening their key features instead of releasing a bunch of new ones I might've been a keen user. Add the fact that at the time I registered, the calendar sync feature did not quite work. Now all I do is receive a notification about one of my ten contacts becoming a year older soon. Woo-hoo.

Evolution is of course natural. But I challenge all the development teams to ask themselves the (perhaps ugly) questions: What is the core of your service? Does this new feature really deliver added value to the end user?

(I am saying all of this as much as to myself as to some lone soul that might still be reading.)

All of this comes down to my following rules-o-thumb:

1. Present the user with the right amount of choices he is capable of deciding upon. Broaden the view later. (1)
2. Take into account the attention span of an average user by presenting the added value - the sweet juices first and foremost. Design as if the whole world has turned ADHD (as if it hasn't).
3. This might some day make your user to become somewhat emotionally attached to your service (yes, you spotted the allegory, didn't you?).
4. And then... only THEN we MIGHT start to speak about brand... Ok forget I ever said that.

(1) Knowing what is enough but not too much, now that's what would cut the cake, right?

Average European consumer about to join the One did it community

June is the time for of holiday trips and this inspired the writer to pick up some facts about European mobility. Did you know that according to EUROSTAT average European Union citizen travels almost 10 000 kilometres by car, about 1 000 kilometres by bus and almost 1 000 kilometres by rail transport every year? This is altogether 12 000 kilometres and the figure does not even include air travel. To illustrate the travelled distance, 12 000 kilometres is approximately the distance as the crow flies from the northernmost point of Finland to Cape Town, the southernmost point of the African continent. Speaking about statistics, mobility is not the only issue that has kept us busy. We have also checked for example composition of average European diet, household energy use and also how strong is the desire for coffee and tea among Europeans.

At the end of summer we will provide test result of a fictitious average European consumer based on statistical data concerning consumers and households in European Union member states. This will enable users to compare their One did it test results with average European figures. At the time being we have consulted a wide range of reports and statistics and compiled a profile of this average consumer.

There will be another addition forthcoming to the test result page. The total result will be visualised so that it is possible to see what the most important sectors of your personal consumption are. We are sure this split of the total result into sections of housing, mobility etc. together with the reference of average consumer data makes it easier to get the whole picture of one’s own consumption behaviour.In the meantime One did it team wishes you a nice holiday season. We look forward to see you in One did it community in the autumn at the latest.

Summer improvements to the One did it application

We have been making some changes to the site content and user interface based on user feedback and comments of our friends and colleagues. We have tried to improve usability overall and also added some features. By the end of this summer, the users will get more information about each others and the One did it community overall. The test result page will be more informative, teams can challenge another teams, and inviting friends will be a lot easier.

We have added ground source heating and wood to the energy section of the test, and also game consoles to the consumer goods section. Later this year there will be two whole new sections in the test, lifestyle including sports and pets and waste where users can input amounts of household garbage and recycled stuff.

We have also launched the Facebook version of this application, but it will be enabled only to developers and restricted test group until autumn. Users can move their profile and saved resources also to the Facebook application if they want and get One did it badge to their Facebook profile. Registered One did it users will get information about Facebook release.

The site and application will still remain beta after these changes, we would be happy to get user feedback for more improvements later this year.

One did it welcomes you

Welcome to One did it developers team blog. Our aim is to tell you a little about behind the scenes happenings in One did it and give sneak peaks to coming features of it. One did it is a community for eco-minded people. At the moment, you can test your consumption of natural resources and reduce it with simple, easy actions. Also, compare the results with your friends, family, neighbours, co-workers – anyone you like. One did it ideology believes that together we are many.

One did it Beta was launched in Green Week 2008, Brussels, Belgium. Finnish MEP Satu Hassi kindly wanted to support us. We had great discussions about eco-efficiency. Hassi thinks that eco-efficiency should be increased by ten times and not at least by personal choices of people. One of her main concerns is energy consumption which should be reduced with small steps over long period of time. It seems that Hassi has very similar thinking as we have in One did it: it all starts with attitude change.

There were four members of One did it team participating Green Week Mari Keski-Korsu, Satu Lähteenoja, Ossi Marko and Marja Salo. We organised a little “guerilla” action in the city centre with Satu Hassi and friends. We covered a zebra crossing with grass and Satu Hassi walked across it barefoot to support our project. It must be mentioned also that we didn't lack drama in Green Week. We organised a press conference about One did it Beta, but there happened to be a demonstration against fuel prices by angry fishermen from all over Europe at the same time. The location of our press conference was right in the centre of police blockade. The journalists who managed to come bravely struggled their way in. Wow.

But now we are back to our Finnish One did it base. Our team is sweating the whole summer to bring new release of One did it the coming autumn. There will be new features and also the old ones are improved plenty. Stay tuned! But meanwhile chop chop, go to www.onedidit.com