Finnish Immigration e-service reinvented — EnterFinland.fi
My son was born in 2014, about 7 years after I came to Finland. When I was trying to apply for his residence permit, I was blown away by EnterFinland.fi, an e-service by the Finnish Immigration Service that made it possible for the people coming to Finland to submit and handle immigration application all on one website. EnterFinland was clean, straight forward, and easy to use, nothing like the website I had to use 7 years ago when I first came to Finland. I couldn’t help but wonder, who made this thing?
When I sat down with Yonatan Kelib of Fjord, one of the designers behind EnterFinland, it became obvious that the bar was set very high from the beginning by the client — design the very best e-service in the world. Migri, the Finnish Immigration Service, made it clear that the new EnterFinland website should save the organisation money by decreasing the amount of incoming paper based application forms, lower incoming support calls, and lower the overall processing cost per application. Not only that, EnterFinland was set to increase overall customer satisfaction, and enrich the first impression for the immigrants to Finland.
Design the very best e-service in the world. — CTO Vesa Hagström, Migri
The result was phenomenal. Already 6 months after the launch, 49% of citizenship applications and 85% of student residence permit applications came through Enter Finland. Handling time has become 30% reduced for student residence permit application from 33 days to 23 days and that of an employed person has become 37% shorter from 139 days to 87 days.
By the time Fjord designers were involved, Migri had already done much research on the problem at hand. Taking those insights as the starting point, the team conducted qualitative user research to understand the challenges users go through when using such services. The methods used included interviews with those users who recently finished the application process online, as well as ‘service safari’. The designers found themselves applying for residence permits, not only for Finland, but also for other countries, such as Norway, Switzerland, Canada, and Australia. The aim was to better understand the experiences — both positive and negative — through the eyes of the applicants and ensure EnterFinland would address them.
The users were not only those who were applying for the permits, but also the public servants who were processing the applications. Co-design workshops with the subject matter experts and public servants, and user tests with rapid prototyping was also part of the design process. All of this was aimed at launching an innovative online service that would showcase the benefits and impact of a user centric approach that would be the catalysts for future projects.
One of the biggest chunk of the work in creating EnterFinland was to decide how much information should be presented to the users at which point — as there was so much information that should be provided to the users along the process. It is no surprise that the website was designed in a close collaboration between the Fjord designers and Migri experts. Project Leader from Migri proactively provided invaluable guidance to the design team, especially on the legal clauses and the mandatory information that should be provided to the applicants.
The result was a friendly and inviting e-service that serves more than 20 thousand applicants annually that are applying for their first residence permit in Finland. Unlike many e-services out there that are technology driven, EnterFinland puts users at the center helping them understand what is required of them when applying for a residence permit, and what they can expect from the service.
In a customer survey done in 2016, 93.8% of users said they would rate EnterFinland either good (39.8%) or very good (53.28%). By that time, the handling time of all application dropped by 37%, and 85% of student application and 50% of citizenship application has come to be handled only through e-service. Not surprisingly, only 8.04% of the users contacted technical support while using EnterFinland.
Today, Fjord and Migri are in a long-term engagement to further develop the e-services and beyond. For example, the recent launch of InLand, the new in-house design and innovation team at Migri, was also supported by the experts at Fjord. Migri is aiming higher this time — they have set to become a benchmark for the rest of Europe for immigration service.
In the next post, I sit down with Yonatan, and talk about his experience as a service designer in the fast-evolving field of service design and digital design — from his background, the move from New York to Finland, to the glorious moments, as well as the challenges. Stay tuned.
This post was originally written in Korean and published in two parts (part I & part II) for DesignPress, a joint venture between Monthly Design magazine and a popular portal & search engine, Naver.
