Research, business and pre-analysis

Creating or improving a service and software development starts with determining users’ expectations and the service’s bottlenecks. Research and a thorough analysis can help save on prototyping and development costs down the line. In this phase, we conduct usability tests, focus groups, participant observations, best practices benchmarking research, quantitative user behaviour, and competition research.

For a business to be successful, it is equally important to understand how the company’s business is conducted, how the value-creating processes work, how to ensure the sustainability of the business models, and how to understand user expectations. A business analysis can help answer whether investing in changing the current business process is worth it and would create value. A pre-analysis will specify which technological solution is needed to implement the change and the costs of obtaining that solution.

To keep the development and service management in focus, a common understanding of the destination, strategy, tactical steps, and the roadmap to arrive at all of them are essential. We are here to help formulate the company’s or services vision and goals using different management and service design tools, and we also provide consultations on planning change management and communications.

Service design based on design thinking is nothing more than planning and work organisation that accounts for the customer. It is a universal methodology that involves the best practices and frameworks for analysing the user and designing services while considering the organisation’s sustainability and profitability.

In collaboration with the Kenyan ICT Authority and under the Team Europe initiative, we carried out service design, business analysis, and created digital environment prototypes to support the digitalisation of three Kenyan public services. One such improvement is the proposed digitalisation of birth registration processes, which could reduce the average time to issue a birth certificate from one year to one day.

We conducted a current state assessment, which included on-site user research in Kenya across various regions, engaging everyday users and local communities. Working closely with service owners, we developed a solution concept. We created prototypes of user interfaces and carried out business analysis for the required process changes. Additionally, we compiled a handbook for Kenyan public institutions on implementing human-centred digital services.

Each Estonian public university uses a Study Information System that supports academic activities and helps organise administrative tasks. The existing systems require updating, and their constant maintenance and development are costly. In collaboration with Universities Estonia, we analysed the current situation and identified opportunities for cooperation, aiming towards the creation of a shared system.

We conducted interviews with stakeholders from Estonian public universities to map their specific needs. In inter-university workshops, we discussed the current state and identified strategic collaboration opportunities. The outcome was a report to guide the development of a cooperative operational and funding model for universities’ digital solutions.

In cooperation with the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications and PricewaterhouseCoopers Ltd, we carried out a vision project with the goal of creating a concept for the Estonian government's event based services and understanding the content and extent of necessary development work.

In the project, we studied five key life events where people need to use different online services from the government. We ended up with a report and some sample versions of what the services could look like. These materials will help guide the development of these services in the future.

The goal of Eurofound was to improve the user experience, value proposition and communications of their information services by relying on the actual needs and use cases of specific target groups, such as EU policymakers, the media and researchers.

We have mapped out user expectations and needs, described personas and their user journeys and a concept for the communication plan. We also prototyped persona-based landing pages and tested those with the users.

In cooperation with the Emergency Response Centre and SMIT (The IT and Development Centre, Ministry of the Interior), we updated the work processes to ensure that help would quickly get to those who need it while the rescue coordinator could offer a positive customer experience, encompassing shorter, conflict-free calls. To make all of that happen, it was important to speed up the process of creating emergency events and to reduce the number of SOS screens.

We conducted observations in the Emergency Response Centre and interviews with police, ambulance and fire personnel. We visualised the AS-IS and TO-BE emergency event creation journeys. We created a design system and designed new dashboard views that took into consideration the complexity of the information system and its interfaces as well the one-minute rule for determining the hazard level of a situation.