UKKO
Many questions and concerns are often related to entrepreneurship. Finland’s most comprehensive service for independent entrepreneurs enables entrepreneurship for everyone and makes it easy.
The client
UKKO.fi is Finland’s most popular service for independent entrepreneurs that provides light entrepreneurs an opportunity to bill their work without the stress of paperwork.
UKKO.fi’s Light Entrepreneurship services enable entrepreneurial activity either without establishing an own company or with a business ID. There are already more than 140,000 UKKO.fi light entrepreneurs and over 4,000 Finnish independent entrepreneurs using the Ukko Private Trader service.
The challenge
Ukko, an advocate of different forms of entrepreneurship and a pioneer in the light entrepreneurship industry, found itself in a situation where there was a need to renew different customer software and external online services, which had fallen behind the growth and accumulated debt both in terms of technical configuration and usability. A service for entrepreneurs, which was making a significant growth leap, wanted to renew and modernize its digital touch points across the board.
In addition to these, there was expansion ahead into the Swedish market, the most competitive playing field.
The overall goals were defined together as a new, unified, and user-friendly look through the various online services, improved user experience, a stable and scalable technical architecture, and a successful entry into the Swedish market.
The solution
From the beginning of the project, understanding the target group guided what was done. Together with the client, it was outlined that there is a difference between the target groups in Finland and Sweden: In Finland, the audience and users are clearly younger and many of them find light entrepreneurship as a new thing, while in the Swedish market it was particularly important to consider multinationalism and multiculturalism.
Our UX and UI Designers made use of the existing data and they set out to lower the threshold for adopting the online service by paying particular attention to ease and intuitiveness and by bringing tools that benefit the customer, such as various counters, along the user journey.
In terms of software development, the focus was multidisciplinary on the development of different software (UKKO, UKKO Pro), refactoring, writing tests and integrations (e.g., to the Finnish tax services).
The results
The design and development work of the software and the renewal of the technical architecture piece by piece together with UKKO.fi’s development team enabled significant development steps in the short term and therefore strengthened UKKO.fi’s position as a market leader in Finland.
Web service renewal together with the localized Swedish version achieved its goals, increasing the website’s conversion rate in Finland and quickly gaining new customers in Sweden.
The meaning
UKKO does socially important work on behalf of improving employment, entrepreneurship and entrepreneurs. For many people, light entrepreneurship acts as a springboard to entrepreneurship and it creates new avenues for career changers, the unemployed and dreamers to create a better tomorrow for all of us. In the center of our partnership was the idea that modern work can be diverse, and that pursuing your dreams should be as easy and uncomplicated as possible.
