Piql

Digital data in a tangible format.

Introduction

Founded in 2002 in Drammen, the company’s vision is to reshape digital preservation by providing a unique method of recording both analog and digital data onto photosensitive film.

The Challenge

Piql's service proposal is to store digital data onto film through a patented method to record and retrieve with zero loss of quality. The service experience was released in an international scale, with partners in 12 countries providing the Piql service offering designed in Norway.

In order to establish a channel with its clients, Piql decided to offer an online account service that would allow them to upload files, tag with metadata, check statistics, and order downloads.

The Challenge

Alice is a set of tools that is used throughout all departments of the company, from sales to accounting. Each tool is seen as separate product that shares components and functionalities with others in the platform ecosystem. Designing solutions for the platform requires a holistic perspective of the functions and a special care with the design system.

With the sudden growth of Loadsmart, several products had to be scaled for larger operations while new and smarter solutions designed from scratch and added to the platform.

My Role

The online account came out of a project with Eggs Design in which I initially participated as a Service Design Lead. I was responsible for conducting the research and designing the service flow for partners of the franchise and end-users.

Once the flow was in place, I proceeded to design the interface using the company's branding and handed all the assets to front-end engineers that developed the product.

DESIGNING THE SERVICE

In order to offer the archiving services to the general public, the company – previously called Cinevation – changed its name and redesigned the whole service to apply a franchising model to Piql Partners. Film recording and reading machines are shipped to different countries, where representatives provide all the handling of data. Together with Piql, we developed a service blueprint to show how the experience would happen.

Hundreds of terabytes of data is transfered to the film in a meticulous process. The film holds both visual files and digital data with the help of a proprietary visual code, similar to QR-code, that makes any file easy to be searched and retrieved.

After recording, the film is treated with a chemical and stored in a custom designed box that can preserve the asset for up to 500 years in ideal conditions of storage.

DESIGNING THE INTERFACE

Piql delivers the film roll to its users, or offers the storage service at their own special facilities. By subscribing to this service, users can access their files through a website that shows all the content of their recorded data.

UPLOAD - Users can request new recordings by simply draging and dropping files to the page. The icons show when the upload is ongoing, failed, or successful.

BROWSING - The navigation with breadcrumbs allows users to search specific files deep into folders down to the raw format, and request them to be restored for download or made offline again.

METADATA - To quickly search the contents of a big file, the interface allows users to tag with their own metadata.

DOWNLOAD - Due to the time needed to read back from a film, users have a page to follow ongoing downloads and cancel a request anytime.

ANALYTICS - Simple analytics is presented in a separate page and available in several formats for download.

Takeaways

This is an example of a completely new service designed for a completely new technology. The project evolved from Service Design to Branding and UX/UI, which has changed the foundation of the company. Today the company operates in more than 15 countries and has preserved the cultural heritage of several worldwide organizations.