The challenge
KONE, the global elevator and escalator company, wanted to move beyond hardware into intelligent building services. Office Flow was the vision: an IoT-connected platform that would predict, optimize, and personalize how people move through buildings — starting with the most friction-filled part of any modern office: the elevator.
The challenge was designing an experience that worked across vastly different building typologies, cultural expectations, and technical infrastructure — while feeling effortless and invisible to end users.
We conducted on-site research in each of the five target markets — Finland, USA, Germany, Singapore, and China — observing how building occupants actually moved through spaces and what friction points created the most frustration. The insights were both universal and sharply regional.
Universally: people hate uncertainty. The most anxiety-producing moment isn't waiting for an elevator — it's not knowing how long the wait will be. Office Flow's primary design goal became reducing uncertainty, not just reducing wait time.
Regionally: expectations around personal space, acceptable crowding thresholds, and information density varied significantly. The German users wanted precise data; Singapore users wanted streamlined simplicity; Chinese users expected deep integration with existing super-apps. We built a flexible system that could accommodate all of these modes.
