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Business Finland is a governmental organisation focused on strengthening the Finnish economy by fostering innovation, supporting business growth, and promoting international competitiveness. Its international website, businessfinland.com, aims to attract foreign investment, talent, and business partnerships.
As a part of an ongoing collaboration, Business Finland commissioned Tietoevry Create to develop an Gen AI-powered interactive element for the website to improve user engagement.
I worked as a UX/UI designer on the project as a part of Tietoevry Create's design team. The project team included Business Finland stakeholders alongside Tietoevry project management and developers. As the primary designer on this project, I oversaw the design process from early concept development to final UI delivery, supported by senior designers within Tietoevry Create.
Some information and material from this project is protected by a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). An asterisk (*) indicates where information has been omitted.
This project came about as part of a longer ongoing collaboration between Business Finland and Tietoevry Create. The website's organisational goals were, therefore, well known: attract international businesses and investors and connect them with relevant Business Finland services.
A particular focus problem was that users reported struggling to find the information that was most relevant to them on the site. This decreased engagement as users were dropping off before finding what they were looking for.
Leveraging Tietoevry Create's expertise in AI development, we explored how emerging generative AI tools could help address this problem. Given users' increasing familiarity with large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, a text-based interface became the natural conceptual starting point for the tool with GPT 4o as the underlying technology.
The overarching goal of the tool was to increase user engagagement by providing users with an efficient and engaging way to access relevant information from across the website. The intention was to build something that was not just a simple chatbot, but a truly interactive smart guide capable of responding intelligently and dynamically to a range of user queries using natural language interaction (NLI).
Business Finland had pre-defined user segments specific to their international website, which also served as the user segments for this tool. They were organised around the user's primary interest, such as investment, partnerships, business permits, and the industries they operate in.*
We reviewed these segments and considered their key needs in context of the AI tool. This analysis led to two main types of outcomes and outputs for the AI to focus on:
One of the primary development guidelines was to harness the AI's capacity for open-ended discussion. The core design challenge was subsequently how to guide the user towards desired outcomes without limiting their interaction using UX and UI patterns. Particular consideration was given to all the unintended ways a user might try and use the tool and how to mitigate these use cases.
The framework of this interaction was conceptualised in a simple user flow.*
We introduced a starter prompt to guide the first steps of the interaction. The AI starts by asking the user about their interests and giving them a number of options to choose from. This allows the AI categorise users into the correct segment.
The AI then asks for additional details about the user's needs and interests until it has enough information to generate the relevant output. Depending on the user's interests, the AI typically ask 2-4 questions before generating output. The AI also allows for non-linear conversation where the user can change their earlier response at any point, overriding the previous conversation by default.
If the conversation is not progressing towards a desired end after multiple prompts from the AI, the tool generates a default "fail safe" response that links the user to useful Business Finland pages.
Since the tool was based around open-ended interaction, the flow could not be hardcoded into the tool in the form of a script or a decision tree. Instead, the AI tool was given general instructions on how to interact with the user through system prompts.
We worked in close collaboration with the client to establish guidelines for these system prompts to align with Business Finland's organisational goals. This included instructions to focus the conversation to topics relevant to Business Finland, to prompt the user enough times so that the AI has sufficient information to generate relevant output, and to adhere to Business Finland's brand tone of voice.
Developers provided input on the capabilities and limitations of GPT 4o throughout.
This balance between guided and open-ended interaction was also built into the user interface. I included predefined clickable options alongside a chat bar, enabling users to switch seamlessly between structured and open communication with the AI.
The purpose of the clickable elements, in particular, was to signal to the user about the topics the tool can help with, namely topics relevant to Business Finland services. They were also included to lower the barrier of engagement and give users an easy way to start interacting with the tool, given that they might be unfamiliar with using an AI interface in this context.
Particular consideration was also given to how to title the tool to signal about its intended use case. At time of writing, it is "Explore What Finland Could Offer For Your Business".
The visual design leveraged familiar user interface patterns from LLMs like ChatGPT while adhering to Business Finland's brand identity. The tool was going to be integrated and featured prominently in the front page, so visual consistency also had to be ensured.
Some visual elements, like colours, typography, and iconography, were taken straight from the website's pre-existing style guide.* Some UI elements, such as the chat bar and the dialogue bubbles, were created specifically for the tool. For these elements, I took inspiration from popular text-based communication platforms such as ChatGPT and Whatsapp to leverage familiar UI patterns.
The end result was an interface that was both functionally intuitive and unique to Business Finland's visual style.
We launched a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) version of the tool in February 2025 to gather early feedback to further refine the AI. It has received positive feedback from early users for its ability to respond with relevant and detailed information to a range of queries.
Future planned iterations include a refined visual layout, CRM integration for improved customer engagement and lead generation, and data analytics for measuring engagement. Further development has been delayed at the time of writing following changes to Business Finland's organisational priorities.
A particularly interesting challenge of this project was designing for emerging AI technologies where the user behaviours and conventions are not well established. Constructing UX and UI patterns to guide user interaction and creating an integrated AI interface, in particular, meant navigating a design space with few precedents. This will be an integral challenge in the future development of this tool as the UX and UI of consumer facing AI continue to improve.