City of Helsinki

Customer-focused insights drive service improvement for Hel.fi

Helsinki's vision for customer research:

• Customer understanding is at the heart of service design. Actionable insights of customer groups, themes and service journeys
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• Engaging city residents in development and testing. Building a customer community to support ongoing research activities, embracing the diversity of the city's residents.
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• Agile research activities, measurements, and learning through continuous testing.
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• Establishing a customer research and testing framework, scaling and sharing learnings through guidelines and templates.

Customer-focused research program for hel.fi website renewal

The City of Helsinki aimed to transform its digital services by renewing the hel.fi website with a strong focus on customer-centricity. The objective was to build a comprehensive customer research program that could guide the development and testing of the website.

This involved engaging residents from diverse backgrounds to ensure the services met the real needs of the community. The goal was to create a more user-friendly experience and foster continuous improvement in the city's digital services.

Agile service design and research for continuous digital improvement

Digitalist collaborated with the City of Helsinki to implement a structured, agile approach using service design and research methods. The process included qualitative and quantitative research, concept validation, and user testing. Digitalist also built and maintained an online community for continuous customer involvement, gathering insights and feedback through surveys, interviews, and workshops.

Digitalist also provided coaching and training for Helsinki's product owners and core teams, ensuring that customer research and service design principles were embedded across all stages of development. This training empowered teams to independently carry out research and maintain a customer-centric approach long after the project's completion, ensuring sustainable, long-term improvements in the city's digital services.

Digitalist’s consultants collaborated with the hel.fi design team, including service, content, and UX designers, as well as product owners, to plan, implement, and analyze both qualitative and quantitative customer research. The work also involved communicating research practices across the organization, systematizing operations, and creating templates and guidelines that facilitated agile development and future scalability.

These efforts helped establish a research framework that supported iterative improvements and ensured the website and related services aligned with user needs.

Extensice customer research across 15+ themes

Digitalist led a comprehensive customer research effort during the renewal of the hel.fi website, focusing on over 15 thematic areas such as childhood and education, health and wellness, and housing. Through qualitative methods, including interviews, surveys, diaries, and concept and usability testing, Digitalist gathered critical insights from diverse user groups. This research ensured that the website development was deeply aligned with the needs of the city’s residents.

In total, over 4,000 Helsinki residents contributed to the research, which played a key role in validating the website's features from concept to final implementation. This collaborative approach ensured that the hel.fi website addressed the needs of a broad demographic, helping to improve user experience and service delivery across multiple sectors.

Establishment of City of Helsinki online customer community

Digitalist was responsible for establishing and maintaining the City of Helsinki’s online customer community. Hosted on Digitalist's LeanLab platform, the community engaged over 700 Helsinki residents in ongoing research and testing efforts as part of the hel.fi website renewal. This community enabled continuous dialogue between residents and the city, ensuring that services were developed with direct citizen input.

By utilizing the LeanLab platform, Digitalist facilitated real-time feedback collection and user engagement, making it easier to test new concepts and validate ideas throughout the website development process. The online community became a vital tool in ensuring the website remained user-focused and adaptable to the needs of its residents.

Coaching and training for customer-focused development

As part of the hel.fi renewal, Digitalist provided coaching and training modules to the City of Helsinki’s product owners and core teams, focusing on service design and customer experience (CX) metrics. This training empowered teams to adopt customer-focused, agile development methods. Digitalist's mentoring extended to weekly clinics, where they supported the teams in user research and testing to ensure best practices were followed.

These efforts helped embed customer-centric methodologies into the city’s digital development processes, ensuring that the teams could independently continue to drive customer-focused innovations. The training was essential for ensuring long-term, sustainable improvements across the city's digital services.

Inclusive participation and systematic customer involvement

Digitalist helped the City of Helsinki implement a customer research inclusion plan to ensure that the city’s digital services reflected the diverse needs of its population. This effort focused on ensuring that underrepresented groups were involved in the development process. In addition, Digitalist developed systematic models for customer involvement, which included guidelines and templates for customer research, user testing, and community moderation.

These models were compiled in the Digital Customer Experience Playbook (https://pelikirja.hel.fi/), with Digitalist contributing to the "Guide to Customer Research" section. The guidelines covered everything from research operations to data protection in research activities, ensuring that the city could maintain a consistent and effective approach to inclusive customer feedback throughout the development of its digital services.