Life in Finland
A) Kevade hook
The kettle was on and another relocation question arrived. People needed a clear answer fast, not another maze of links.
Why
The user experience moved from scattered exploration to guided progression. The editorial experience moved from reactive patching to structured updates with clearer ownership.
Explore selected screens and layouts from this project:
Screenshots
Case Study: Poetry then Receipts
Project year: 2018D) Story
Life in Finland serves people navigating high-stakes decisions: permits, housing, work, and daily systems. The redesign focused on wayfinding as care. We rebuilt structure and copy so users can move from uncertainty to action with fewer loops, while editors keep content current without breaking the information architecture. This project is service design in web form: clear routes, reduced friction, and measurable comprehension.
B) Site + Situation
- Site: Finland public-information context for international and multilingual audiences.
- Condition: Dense content, high anxiety tasks, and repeated return visits.
- Ritual: Search, compare official guidance, and continue tasks over multiple sessions.
- Material: Trust language, readability, maintainability, and performance under information load.
C) Kitchen Notes
- Dish: A wayfinding system that helps people act with confidence.
- Ingredients: Legacy information tree, top search intents, stakeholder and editor feedback.
- Heat: Frequent policy updates and limited capacity for manual rework.
- Taste test: Findability tests, readability checks, and search-intent mapping to destination pages.
E) Signals
- Analytics signals: task-heavy traffic concentrated around permits, housing, and work pathways.
- Research signals: users reported repeating the same searches without confidence in next steps.
- Performance signals: template budgets introduced to protect responsiveness on mobile.
- Accessibility signals: improved focus behavior, link context, and semantic heading structure.
F) Decisions
- Reorganized IA around user tasks instead of organizational structure.
- Introduced staged disclosure so complex guidance unfolds in manageable steps.
- Reworked typography and spacing for sustained reading on small screens.
- Aligned search pathways with destination pages to reduce dead-end behavior.
G) Score
- Receipt: Query-level instrumentation enables ongoing content-gap triage.
- Receipt: Path-depth tracking reveals where users stall before completion.
- Receipt: Performance and accessibility checks now operate as release gates.
- If historical baseline gaps exist, retain current tracking model for at least one full policy cycle before claiming directional impact.
H + I) Artifacts and Leftovers
- Artifact: Journey map for relocation decisions across multiple sessions.
- Artifact: IA blueprint for task-first navigation and progressive disclosure.
- Artifact: Search-intent taxonomy linked to content ownership.
- Leftover: Next iteration should add in-page feedback prompts to capture unresolved intent in real time.