The project background
Since 2016, I have been involved in the Suomi.fi Finnish Service Catalogue (referred to as FSC from now on) that is a centralised data repository where organisations provide information on their public sector services and service channels. In Finnish the name of the service is Suomi.fi-palvelutietovaranto, that is owned by Digital and Population Data Services Agency (Digi- ja väestötietovirasto (DVV)). Project is part of the big ICT program run by the Finland's Ministry of Finance. The service is currently published under the https://palveluhallinta.suomi.fi/fi.
Design challenge of having reliable and high quality data
There is a lot of going on between the service strategy and the concrete user interface (UI) specifications and implementation. An example of a business requirement “FSC data quality needs to be improved” is followed by ideation of how it can be reached. The organization’s that need to keep the data up to date need to be motivated and committed to the task and this requires communicating to and educating the FSC users about what is new in the service.
My role is to understand the business requirements and to empathize with the service users. In the day-to-day use of the service the service UI itself needs to remind the users that the data needs to be checked and updated in the FSC service application. This leads to more concrete ideas and specifications in the user interface (UI) itself.
One way is to draw a user journey of what the user’s actions are when they become aware of the topic. How are the users being reminded and what would the user do in the service UI? I need to know also from the technical point of view that can the FSC system pinpoint to the user what data needs to be updated and are we able to notify (e.g. via email), since the users do not visit the service every day. Indeed, we now know the FSC system can collect the data of which services and service channels need to be updated and we can show the number of tasks per topic that is awaiting the users in the FSC service. Unfortunately, we are not able to send personalized email, so that the user would only get the tasks related to the content she or he has worked on but now it’s the list of what the whole organization should work on. Here is an area to be developed.
A service blueprint is a good tool to better describe to the development team and other stakeholders that how the user’s actions at different touch points (website, email, service desk) are related to the technical and support systems. In this case, I drew a service blueprint to explain that the first reminder emails are sent to organization main users and data editors 3 months before the deadline (see orange highlighted box). For the email to make sense to the specific user, the system (backstage actions) feeds organization specific content with correct number of tasks and topics that the user should pay attention to. If the user doesn’t act on the tasks, a new reminder email with the same content is sent again one month before the expiration of the data.
Since the notification email is communication only to one direction from the FSC to the organization users, in the notification email it is advertised as an option that it is to send feedback and to receive an answer from the customer support team. It is a separate function but is included in this service blueprint to show how the support is included in this process.
Suomi.fi Finnish Service Catalogue service blueprint on reminder emails for organisation main users and data editors to update expiring content.
