The city of Helsinki – towards better digital user experiences
Paradigmatic change is ongoing in how digital user experiences are developed. The change is mainly driven by dynamic and growing user expectations that demand individual digital experiences, and fast and easy services with intuitive user interfaces. The timespan that people are willing to waste with poor digital user experience is getting all the time lower.
Big cities, like the Finnish capital Helsinki, is no exception. They need to interact with society and serve their citizens digitally. The challenges that cities usually face are the complex organizational structures in silos, many different APIs combined with little resources, and a vast variety of services they offer to serve all citizens. The whole digital user journey is often overlooked because of these complexities.
For citizens, it’s important that the user experience is seamless, regardless of the different administrative boundaries. The usability should be great and all the information is easy to find according to the interests of the visitors.
It has now become imperative to have actionable and highly utilized data to create relevant, personalized user experiences. Luckily, new personalization technologies enable and fuel the speed of digital changes.
The goal for Mikko Rusama, CDO from the city of Helsinki, is to make the city of Helsinki the most functional city in the world utilizing opportunities enabled by digitalization. The journey with Frosmo started in fall 2019 with My personalized hel.fi digital service.
“Helsinki aims to be the city in the world that makes the best use of digitalization. It’s been a pleasure to work with Frosmo. Their knowledge and technical expertise of personalized user journeys have helped us to get closer to our goal.”
Mika Lappalainen, Editor-In-Chief, The city of Helsinki
My personalized hel.fi
My personalized hel.fi is a digital service where a visitor is able to search for local events, information, and news that are close to them.
Frosmo’s solution combines different data points by utilizing different APIs and combining information that would normally be scattered in different parts of their website. By using the geolocation data, the service can recommend events and news that are happening in close proximity (up to 1 km) of the searcher. The service also allows the user to search by writing the address if the events of some other location are more interesting.
The results are shown on the map as well as on the list.
Goals for the solution:
- Make sure that the content is easier to find and more easily accessible
- Better usability of the website
- More personalized user experience
- Better engagement with different services
“We have validated the Frosmo personalization software and it has proven to be reliable as it satisfies the rigid requirements of the City of Helsinki technology.”
Kalle Mikkolainen, Service Manager, IT Department.
Frosmo works as a headless front-end technology that enables an easy way to combine multiple APIs, data points, and segmentation for one seamless user experience. It doesn’t require any changes to the back end making it easy to use by non-technical employees. Read more about how we help cities and government agencies give easier access to the information that people need. Reach out, we’re happy to help.