The project background
Since 2016, I have been involved in the Suomi.fi Finnish Service Catalogue (referred to as FSC from now on). In Finnish the name of the service is Suomi.fi-palvelutietovaranto, that is owned by Digital and Population Data Services Agency (Digi- ja väestötietovirasto (DVV)). Project is part of the big ICT program run by the Finland's Ministry of Finance. The service is currently published under the https://palveluhallinta.suomi.fi/fi.
Design challenge of entering data in correct format
The challenge is to support the users in entering the data that is grammatically correct and in the structure that supports the data model. The Suomi.fi Finnish Service Catalogue (FSC) is a centralised data repository where organisations provide information on their services and service channels. The content creators are government officials working in municipalities and in different government organizations, and unlike the role content creator suggests, they are not all professional writers and some need a lot of support from the service UI and the FSC support team to create high quality and correct data.
As NLP (Natural language processing) system was integrated to FSC we were able to build an UI that supports the content creation for example by giving feedback on the correct way of writing Finnish, Swedish and English grammar. The NLP system sends the information regarding the text’s typo and grammar errors that is very similar to the function of the Word application. The UI guides the user also not to enter data such as person’s name, phone number, url, or post or street address to the service description text to ensure the pure structure of the data.
I drew the wireframes on how the feedback is shown to the users and specified the detailed use cases on the rules of the feedback. There are specific fields for each type of data and thereby it can be better utilized and validated. The dark yellow visualisation was chosen instead of red in the field frames to communicate to the user that corrections are needed, but on the other hand they are not errors that would prevent publishing the service.
Now the content creators who were not following the specific rules of for example not entering links or person's names in the service description field would get instant feedback on not doing so. And we all appreciate the feedback on typos and grammar.
Suomi.fi Finnish Service Catalogue service supports the users in adding content by giving feedback on the grammar and structure of the text.
