My name is Tommi Luhtala. I'm a designer with 11+ years across service, business and AI design — from hands‑on interviews and workshops to prototypes and building businesses. I get excited about digital services aimed at a world‑class customer experience.
You get inside your users' heads with good user research — research that produces actionable, testable insight into real needs.
The first version is never the best. Build fast, put it in front of real users, measure, and improve the next version.
Every decision stays human-centred, even when the subject is systems, integrations and technology.
Experience is a tool, not a conclusion. I dig past the first answer to the emotion underneath — it usually comes down to psychology.
Great design is a symptom of a culture that values user-centred thinking. Bad design is a symptom of one that can't tell good research from bad.
Small business customers are a huge, heterogeneous group served with tools designed for large corporates — or for private customers. Neither fits a sole trader, and personal service doesn't scale.
Small business customers are a huge, heterogeneous group served with tools designed for large corporates — or for private customers. Neither fits a sole trader.
Personal service does not scale to that many customers, and every unresolved journey turns into a phone call, a branch visit, or a lost sale.
Deep customer interviews, data gathering and agent interviews. Then synthesis with the team: empathy maps, true needs, values and motivators, and jobs-to-be-done mapping to separate what customers say from what they're actually hiring the bank to do.
From there: end-to-end journeys, concepts, prototypes and mockups, usability and concept testing — helping product teams build effective solutions and dashboards for revenue and experience optimisation.
Every journey was optimised on three axes at once: customer experience, revenue and technological feasibility.
Onboarding to daily banking, designed as one continuous path rather than separate screens owned by separate teams.
A working loop from customer feedback and interviews to prioritised, testable development tasks.
Concepts and prototypes validated with real entrepreneurs before development spent a sprint on them.
A great digital experience for solo, micro and small companies — customers who had been served with processes built for enterprises. I led the design work, the external design resources, and the steering with business and technical leads.
Heterogeneous needs. Many segments, and none of them had much in common with the others.
Cost effectiveness. Personal service to solo companies doesn't pay for itself; existing channels were built for medium and large businesses.
Thin internal support. Customers bought devices carrying Telia logos but couldn't get Telia support — and the service wasn't advertised.
Deep insight interviews. Surveys and qualitative interviews, plus Hotjar on a test landing page so we could interview the people it actually attracted.
Journey mapping. Simple customer journeys and a detailed service blueprint to align the team and other countries.
Testing. Concept testing with Cambri, rapid usability testing in the UX phase, and pilot customers co-creating the service.
We went live with a soft launch and found real demand for flexible, effortless operator services — with no competitor offering devices-as-a-service this way.
Internally it became the reference for how the company works, and the concept was built to launch in Norway too.
A provisionable, flexible device-as-a-service offering that didn't exist in the market before.
Built new, with features designed for digital-first small business customers.
The company learned how to buy, manage and lead design — and how to work as one team across units.
Sonera and Tele Finland merged into Telia. Two price points, two consumer segments, one locked deadline — and a migration that had to happen in a single night. We chose to nudge rather than force.
Change is difficult. Two brands, different prices and segments — not every customer could be pleased.
Experience. A forced migration would have been a bad experience, so we nudged customers to choose the new brand voluntarily.
Schedule. A very strict, locked deadline before the "forced" migration would happen regardless.
Data research & deep insight. Evidence from earlier migrations and brand renewals, plus interviews with stakeholders from Telia's other countries and deep customer research.
Collaborating. Facilitating workshops and creating journeys and a blueprint to communicate with other streams and stakeholders.
Prototyping & A/B testing. Mockups, prototypes, usability and concept testing with customers, and A/B testing through the pilot phase.
Project lead: project management and responsibility for the deliverables, alongside the design work itself.
The team learned to work more in an agile way under uncertainty — to ideate, test and iterate in a customer-centric way.
Customer migration in Finland ran ten times faster than the equivalent migration in Norway.
The new online flow converted better than anything the company had run before.
Rapid testing entered the routine, and a referral programme had customers hyping their new brand.
Two rounds of deep insight interviews with all stakeholders under NDA, then a concept for the ministry — mapping scenarios and journeys to understand who the users are and what they need in each situation.
Two rounds of deep insight interviews with all stakeholders under NDA, then a concept for the ministry.
Once accepted, we mapped scenarios and journeys to understand who the users are and what their jobs-to-be-done are in each situation.
Ideation and concept development — mapping needs and desires to hold a clear vision — and leading the design development with journeys and a detailed blueprint.
Usability and concept testing of the pilot site with current users and real-life scenarios, with feedback gathered directly and by shadowing meetings.
We prototyped and co-created with stakeholders, then built an MVP showing how the service could support decision-making in different scenarios.
Despite geopolitical and safety obstacles, we defined a uniform way for regions to report and communicate — and built a backlog for the first version.
Aalto University, School of Electrical Engineering
Major in network economics, minor in industrial management — a combination of technology, business and psychology. Further studies in choice architecture and the psychology of decision making.
Design lead / service designer / business designer / AI designer. Available for design lead and service design roles.