The Concept Connoisseur: Krista Mellin
Krista started working with Veracell in the beginning of 2019. She started with brand building and continued to participating in customer projects. When not working with clients, she is splitting her time between marketing, sales support and product design, in addition to being part of the management team.
"I hold a master’s degree in arts and culture, specifically interaction design and media production, and have since been studying also graphic design and psychology. For some reason I thought I’d make a good engineer, but after a short stint in technology studies I’m quite confident switching to design was a good decision.
My professional background is largely in consulting and I have been designing concepts and products for nearly two decades. My experience covers different domains such as healthcare, financial services, e-commerce, marketing, education, public infrastructure, cloud services, robotics, and process mining. A typical role for me is concept designer, with links into business and service design and further into details also to UI and visual design. Years in product R&D have built a good understanding of design systems and how to keep a product consistent over time and across channels."
As an example about larger projects, Krista has been leading design for a healthcare and well-being product family at Tietoevry for five years. During this time she created concepts for public and private healthcare and explored how modern technologies like natural language processing could aid healthcare professionals.
"From early on I’ve been interested in data. At 3rd grade I learned Excel and made, in my opinion, very interesting charts about important things like GDP growth of Tuvalu island. Machine learning and artificial intelligence have been the main theme after joining Veracell. Lately I've been designing concepts and user interfaces for distributed computing, process mining and cryptocurrency.
What I’ve found out working in data science projects is that with novel technology it is easy to get carried away by experimenting with everything new. A big part of the challenge is finding the right use cases. This is why I've been bridging the user needs, business requirements and technological solutions into tangible concepts and service blueprints."
As technology sprints forward, oftentimes human-computer interaction lags behind. While a business can get a boost from finding better ways to gather, store, improve and finally benefit from the abundance of data, it is important to make sure the end product is also human-friendly, ethically sound and provides real value.
"For me, designing for AI is a bit backwards in the eyes of a UX designer, as the new technological possibilities are hardly visible to the non-data scientist. Being an expert in a very niche area is enviable, but deep expertise may blur the lines of what kind of concepts others are able to grasp. A designer has the opportunity to be the translator of complexity, which makes our profession ever so interesting."
Ready to transform your data dreams into reality? There’s no better time than now. Let’s reimagine the future together.
