The Finnish Forest Centre's Metsään.fi website now also serves forest owners and forest industry companies via mobile devices. Accessibility and usability were the most important goals of the service renewal.
The Finnish Forest Centre's Metsään.fi website serves more than 60,000 forest owners and service providers in the forest sector every year.
The website was renewed in a two-year project that was part of the Forest Centre's broader digital roadmap. - We managed to update 12 systems on time in four years, says Tapani Hämäläinen, Development Director at the Forest Centre, with satisfaction.
In addition to technological development, the need to renew the Metsään.fi service was due to the changed application process for Metka grants. At the beginning of March 2024, it was also supposed to be possible to apply for subsidies electronically. - It gave the software project an absolute deadline and made the time natural for the renewal of the entire service, says Hanna Parviainen, Project Manager at the Forest Centre.
The Metsään.fi service website was created by a consortium of Sitowise and Bitcomp, which is currently part of the same company. Cooperation with the Forest Centre was already carried out in the Lähde project, and maps and satellite monitoring data related to forest felling are continuously produced for the Forest Centre.
We designed the mobile user interface, which was the most challenging and at the same time rewarding part of the project.
Elice Pynninen, Sitowise
Metsään.fi serves as a showcase for the Forest Centre's wide range of services. That is why it was necessary to make the service easy to use, accessible and device-independent. Forest owners must be able to use the service with their mobile phone, for example, on their own forest plot.
- The first thing we did was design a mobile user interface, which was the most challenging and at the same time rewarding part of the project, says Elice Pynninen, Senior Digital Consultant in Sitowise's service design team. For example, data simplification, grouping and visualization were carefully considered.
During the busiest phase, the service design team consisted of three people. It ensured that the entire chain from conceptualization to pixel-perfect UI design went smoothly. Success was also guaranteed by close cooperation with the customer. - We got really great guidance, says Pynninen.
Already during the process, user feedback on the service was sought from the customer panel, and finally, a third-party accessibility audit was carried out on the site at the target level AA (A–AAAA). According to Pynninen, the service takes into account different user groups and usage situations. - We succeeded in highlighting the facts that interest users the most, such as recommended measures for their own forest and important nature information.
Once the business goals and user needs had been translated into a user-friendly user interface prototype, Sitowise's development team took over. The task of the application developers was to integrate the service into the Forest Centre's other digital projects and systems through software integrations.
- The processing of applications involved only a small amount of our own master data, but the challenge was to transfer data between many different systems, says Mikko Kolehmainen, Technical Architect at Sitowise. In addition, the second aspect of the service, viewing forest resource data, contained a huge amount of diverse information.
Metsään.fi was published in the global cloud, i.e. the public cloud. According to Kolehmainen, it makes it easier to maintain the service. For example, if there is a need to increase capacity, there is no need to order new servers from the data center, which could take weeks. - At best, capacity changes are automated.
According to Hämäläinen, the implementation of the service went smoothly, and the goals set for the project have been achieved well in other respects as well. - The technical implementation and coding are of high quality, and there has been little room for improvement. The findings in the information security audit were also very small.
At the request of the Finnish Forest Centre, the project used the SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) working model. It provided a common framework for application developers in different system projects. – SAFe's strength was particularly evident in the coordination of different projects and the management of dependencies, Hämäläinen says.
Although Sitowise's application development team is used to agile Scrum work, SAFe required a new kind of rhythm. - Along the way, we learned to estimate workloads more accurately, and we also increased the number of application developers from three to eight, says Hanna Visuri, Project Manager at Sitowise.
She felt that the customer's active participation in the project was a great help. The Forest Centre's project team's extensive substantive expertise and understanding of customer needs were reflected in the precise specifications, and cooperation was carried out on a daily basis. - We didn't spend time wondering or waiting, but we were able to make sure together all the time that we were doing the right things.
Parviainen is pleased with how the work was developed together. - All our ideas were very well received, and we actually moved forward much faster than we had thought.
According to Hämäläinen, it is part of the spirit of the Forest Centre to carry out development work together.
Our cooperation with Sitowise was very functional and solution-oriented. When you commit to goals together, things also get resolved and succeed.
Tapani Hämäläinen, Finnish Forest Centre
The Metsään.fi service was put into production on schedule, and the feedback received from users has been almost entirely positive. Parviainen also has good things to say about the processing of aid applications. - When the application process for Metka grants opened in the new service on 1 March, we received the first applications in just half an hour. So using the service must be pretty easy!