Asking for a building permit is an administrative task that sucks. It takes ages and is very frustrating. Solita, a Finnish design agency, used a service design approach to fix this problem with the Finnish Ministry of Environment.

They created a platform called Lupapiste. This electronic service helps architects, planners, engineers, and even regular citizens in their process of asking for a building permit.

The platform was created in a deep collaboration with its users. The team used paper prototypes, a tool that we will speak about in chapter 5, to quickly ask for feedback about the new solution to fix the frustrating experience of asking for a building permit.

More importantly, the processing times were now 90% shorter! For example, for excavation permits, the previous processing time was of 3 to 4 weeks; now, it would just take an average of one day, which definitely sucks way less.

This shows that by working with the users from the start, service designers are able to take out the frustration of a service, make it faster, and save a shitload of money.