Image Credit : Nortal User Experience Team (NUX), eesti.ee, 2021
Project Overview
Estonia’s “digital success” has become a blueprint for countries’ digitalization efforts around the world. However, outstanding success is only achieved and maintained if public solutions continue to serve their users and meet their rising expectations.
This project aimed to elevate the user experience for the eesti.ee portal, that serves as the key channel for people in Estonia to communicate with the state, access public services and find answers to questions concerning their daily lives. The portal enables these interactions through a single digital environment and is vital in Estonia’s digital ecosystem. It centralizes access to more than 500 public e-services, 500 articles and 2,500 contacts and sees more than 18,000 visits per weekday.
Therefore, we set out to advance the visitors’ user experience to new levels by personalizing the eesti.ee environment and by displaying the information and services of utmost relevance for any individual user.
Against the background of Estonia’s “digital way of life,” and therefore the portal’s centrality to everyday state-citizen interactions, an enhanced user experience is crucial to increasing people’s quality of life and ensuring the continuous development of Estonia’s digital state.
Project Commissioner
Republic of Estonia Information System Authority
Project Creator
Team
Service Designer - Maria Laanejärv
Service Designer - Helen Kokk
UX/UI Designer - Eduard Rosenberg
Project Brief
The eesti.ee portal is the main gateway to various state services that people need in their day-to-day lives. This includes any e-service provided by state institutions, such as applying for documents and benefits, registering a child’s birth, starting a business or filing taxes.
The project’s underlying challenge was to simplify the access and personalize the experience for Estonia’s whole population of 1.3 million people, who constitute the target group of the portal. Complicating things, in addition to Estonians, the country is home to residents of more than 190 different nationalities and the services must be accessible to partially sighted persons. Further, the portal is also the first point of contact with the state for more than 70,000 Estonian e-Residents from over 160 countries.
The project is situated within the broader context of Estonia’s long-term digitalization goals. Our contribution is aligned with the government’s strategic vision for building a “seamless state,” which harmonizes state-citizen interactions through proactive services. Our project was a significant leap forward in supporting this vision’s realization by increasing eesti.ee’s potential as a centralizing element in state service provision.
Project Need
The goal of this project was to make state services even more accessible to everyone who has to communicate with the Republic of Estonia. This, in turn, is bound to increase people’s satisfaction with the services provided by the state.
We found that users, especially foreign nationals, were often sceptical about the portal’s relevance. This was mainly linked to their prior biases around state systems or individual experiences with eesti.ee that had confused them previously. With the improved user experience, such instances are projected to be minimized. This will support the portal’s growing relevance as an easily accessible “first stop” to start any interaction with the state.
Furthermore, one of the primary needs in improving the solution of the portal was further development of the state’s Veera design system. The Veera framework aims to achieve a unified user experience between all public e-services eventually. Currently, switching between different e-services sometimes entails entering another portal via eesti.ee. According to user feedback, this can have a disorienting effect as it involves a brief learning curve to navigate a new environment taking time and effort. Building and enhancing the common framework will help minimize this effect in the future.
Therefore, an enhanced user experience is predicted to have a snowball effect on further growth in the usage and adoption of eesti.ee. Considering the diverse user group, this impacts Estonian citizens and foreign nationals, both resident in Estonia or those connected to the state through e-Residency.
User Experience
Given the wide range of services and the large target group involved, we decided to use the Triple Diamond Method to establish users’ points of contact, wishes and possibilities.
In the discovery phase, users from 10 different focus groups were interviewed: retired 65+, young people, family people, accountants, foreigners, business owners, young professionals, the visually impaired, professionals 40+. These conversations shed light on the target groups’ different motivations and needs, drawing attention to the stark contrast in some user needs and overlapping challenges and expectations. Additionally, service design tools included persona mindset maps based on available services and the existing use data and statistics, customer journey map for each of the established personas, which gave us a better understanding of their possible expectations for the portal’s services.
These insights helped us understand how to create a more intuitive solution, which was to be centered on personalized user needs and tested for further validation via functional, clickable prototypes in proof-of-concept phase.
In the development phase, we enhanced and upgraded the Veera design system used by the state. Veera is the common framework for the interoperability of all state websites (incl. combination of visual solutions and best practices of various public services). It lays out the general architectural principles of the portals of state and local government agencies, as well as the requirements for their technical, organizational and semantic solutions. The Veera framework aims to achieve a unified user experience between all public e-services.
Project Marketing
We believe this project allowed our team to enhance the quality of life for the people connected to the Republic of Estonia. This ambitious, indirect objective was tackled through the project’s primary aim: an upgraded user experience for eesti.ee – the main digital gateway to state-citizen interactions in Estonia. The portal enables these interactions through a single digital environment and is vital in Estonia’s public digital ecosystem.
The final version of the eesti.ee state portal was released in the end of 2020. The state services have now become even more accessible to everyone who has to communicate with the Republic of Estonia. This, in turn, is bound to increase people’s satisfaction with the services provided by the state.
By increasing user experience quality through intuitive design and personalization, we expect people to have more time and energy to focus on their daily tasks. Furthermore, with a higher quality of automated “self-service,” such results can decrease bureaucracy on the state’s side and support the more efficient use of state resources.
With our personalized and intuitive solution, we have eliminated the primary pain points and confusion associated with the portal’s previous design. Improving the user experience for each of the diverse target personas, and the associated stakeholders, will enhance the reputation of the state portal and users’ satisfaction with state services. Subsequently, this is predicted to have a positive impact on the further adoption of the solution.
Project Privacy
Estonian Data Protection Inspectorate makes sure that people’s private information (personal data) is sufficiently protected. The Inspectorate also ensures that information on the activity of institutions (public information) is sufficiently available. The right to the protection of personal data and the right to public information are constitutional rights. The constitution also grants everybody the right to inquire about the data collected about their person.
Further information can be found:
https://www.eesti.ee/en/security-and-defense/safety-and-security/protection-of-personal-data-and-privacy/
Digital - Government Services
The provision of timely government services has been transformed as applications and sites are developed and implemented to either replace or complement previous methods. Be it the delivery of current and up to date critical information, compliance, community support and engagement, notification and registration or providing greater accessibility to government resources.
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