Suppilo - A digital service platform

One part of the Finnish Transport Infrastructure Agency’s (Väylävirasto, formerly Liikennevirasto) digitalization process was to develop the data management administrative process of road and railway design and implementation. Each plan requires statements from officials and specialists. Citizens need to be heard and people should have the opportunity to give feedback during the process. The objective was to study the current process as well as propose steps for a new digitalized service platform.

Alongside orientation and desktop study a series of stakeholder interviews and design workshops were arranged. User needs were recognized and formulated into use cases. We utilized Sitowise's inhouse specialist in road & railway planning, service design and information technology. The administrative process of road and railway design and implementation is governed by Finnish law. Therefore it is essential to be able to track down the process handling, required documents and decision making. A process overview was drawn to understand the bigger picture, linked together with all use cases and various stakeholders. This method became a tool for iterative development during the design process.

Preliminary user interface prototypes were hand-drawn to clarify design thinking and to remove some bigger bugs before moving to more elaborate environment. Three user groups with selected use case flows were picked for prototyping. The wireframes were then taken to a proprietary UX design software to be designed into a working prototype, together with the preliminary visual styling for the system prototype. Again, the next level of prototyping demoed the system so clearly that many development ideas were quickly discovered, which led to new design iterations.