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Digital Services is building new relationships at the City and in our community to improve the public’s digital experience. In 2025, we’re working on permitting, user research, accessibility, and a whole lot more. Here, we lay out our plan to bring you quality digital services in the coming year.
Digital Services is excited about our work in 2025. We’re a new team at the City, and we have more than a few opportunities to make a big impact on how our community engages with the City of Portland.
Our work involves partnering with groups across the City to bring a user-centric approach to digital service delivery. We take best practices from software development and mix them with a civic mindset. We make quick iterations and adjust our work based on feedback. We like to make improvements sooner, versus later.
Our goal is simple: build digital services that are easy to find, easy to use, and easy to understand. We envision the City of Portland providing seamless digital services that grow and change with our community’s needs. We’re excited and honored to do this work.
So we’d like to share a few of the projects we’re working on to enhance the public’s digital experience with the City of Portland in 2025.
Building better permitting services
In late 2024, Portland Permitting & Development (PP&D) engaged our team to help improve their websites. PP&D wants the permitting process to be easy for homeowners, business owners, and developers to build a better Portland. But the problem, they told us, is that getting a permit in Portland can sometimes be confusing.
After all, PP&D oversees a pretty complex system, covering everything from sidewalk signs to new building construction. These permits help guide the use and development of the city’s built environment in a way that’s safe and sustainable for all Portlanders. There are dozens of permits with their own specific rules and requirements, and in 2024, PP&D reviewed over 7,000 applications from the community.
To help the people get a permit, PP&D maintains a website that has grown over the years to include over 4,000 webpages, documents, and images. No wonder the process can be confusing! The issue isn’t only the amount of information, but how it’s organized and how the community uses it in their journey to reach their goals.
So we’re partnering with PP&D to improve the community’s digital experience of their services.
Our focus:
- Clearer content
- We’re making changes to help homeowners, business owners, and builders get the information they need.
- More user-friendly experience design
- We’re exploring ways to simplify and streamline the interactions users have to move through the permitting process.
- Community input
- We’re talking to real human people who use the permitting process, so we can get the best insights possible.
We see the bigger picture of our work as making it easier to build and improve homes and businesses in the community. As it gets easier to build, Portland gets more affordable, and businesses and workers can thrive. Improving the permitting experience will help our city grow in a way that benefits everyone.
⭐ Digital Services’ 2025 goal: Using community surveys, we will double the percentage of customers who find permitting content to be "very helpful."
Engaging with our community
Good digital services start with listening. If we don’t get input from real people, then we’re designing digital services based on a best guess or a gut feeling, not real data. We need to know how people actually use our services so we can keep making them better.
Setting up a user research process is a good challenge that we’re happy to undertake. But first, we need to figure out the tools to design the tests and conduct the interviews. Then we need to find all the people, interview them, then turn their insights into real improvements to our websites and apps.
But wait, how do we find people to test our services? And what then? What do we give them for their time and attention? A cupcake? A Digital Services pencil?
To add another tricky layer to this project, there’s also the issue of money. Keeping with the City’s mission of equity, it only makes sense to pay people for their input. If we didn’t pay, then we’d only get the opinions of people who have the time to sit for interviews in the middle of the day. One big challenge is figuring out how to do that in a targeted, strategic way, so that we can deliver community insights on a tight budget.
But it turns out that giving money to people raises a few legal, ethical, and bureaucratic speed bumps. Where do we get the money? How do we give it out? Do they pay tax on it? What rules do our new friends in the Office of Management and Finance have about all this? Being the good City employees that we are, we need to figure out how to account for everything and follow all rules, laws, and guidance from our cool new accountant and lawyer friends.
This might be a thorny process, but we’re determined to figure it out because we need the community’s input on the things they’ll use.
Our focus:
- Inclusive participation
- We’re making sure everyone has a voice in shaping City services.
- Fair compensation
- We’re working to change City policies so we can pay community members for user testing.
- Ongoing feedback
- We’re partnering with the public to refine and improve services over time.
We think of community engagement as a cornerstone of all the work we do. Setting up this process will create an opportunity for all groups in the City to directly engage with the communities we serve.
Do you want to help us test our digital services? Send an email to research@portlandoregon.gov.
⭐ Digital Services’ 2025 goal: We will pay community members fair compensation for their valuable feedback.
Improving digital accessibility
By 2026, cities the size of Portland will need to comply with the US Department of Justice’s rule on digital accessibility.
This rule says that all public-facing websites, applications, and digital services owned and offered by the City should be built and written in a way that’s universally accessible. That means that our websites and apps need to be fully usable by people of all abilities. This includes people who use screen readers to narrate a website and people with hearing impairments who need captions on videos. Accessibility gets more complex than that, but that’s the basic idea.
We think of this project as having two big areas of focus: fixing what already exists and helping to define the standards and tools for what is yet to come.
To help fix what already exists, we’re going through all the City-owned applications that Portlanders use for things like paying a water bill or reporting a crime (and also the fun stuff like signing up for an art class or getting a free air conditioner). We’ll use this audit to fix things and to collaborate with different groups across the City. For digital products that are yet to come, we’re improving the Portland.gov platform, setting technical standards, and helping to train the many people at the City who make content for the website.
We think the 2026 deadline is a great thing. It’s a chance for all of us at the City to work toward a shared goal of improving digital services for everyone. Accessibility improvements make for a better user experience and align with the City’s goals of equity, ease of use, and building trust with our community.
Since Digital Services is all about improving the public’s digital experience, we’re committed to this work.
Our focus:
- Accessibility audits
- We’re reviewing City websites and applications for compliance and we're fixing issues that come up.
- Staff training
- We’re providing tools to help City employees make their content accessible.
- Sustainable practices
- We’re building accessibility into everything we work on.
⭐ Digital Services’ 2025 goal: We will establish the processes and tools for all City employees to make their content accessible by the 2026 federal deadline.
Exploring community login accounts
Because we’re champions of human-centered design, we see each member of our community as a whole person. Each person has a relationship with the City that unfolds over time and moves through different digital experiences. But right now, interacting with the City online can feel like starting from scratch every time. You might have one account to pay your water bill, another for requesting a public record, and yet another for opening your boutique cannabis shop. That’s a lot of accounts!
Right now, we don’t have a modern, seamless community login system. That can sometimes be frustrating. For example, you might have to enter the same information multiple times because these systems don’t have a way of talking to each other or knowing that you’re the same person. In short, our digital services don’t know that you are you, and we think that should change.
The big challenge is to find a way for the City’s digital systems to have one secure login account that connects all our important (and fun) City applications. We envision a login system that just works, and helps Portlanders reach their goals in easy and meaningful ways. To achieve this vision, we're working with our partners at the City in security, technical systems, and business processes.
Together, we will realize this future of a unified community experience.
Our focus:
- Simplifying access
- We’re figuring out how to reduce repetitive or conflicting data entry across City services.
- Personalized, secure experiences
- We’ll blaze a viable path to a future community experience that could include a single login.
- User testing
- We’re making sure any solution we build meets real-world needs.
⭐ Digital Services’ 2025 goal: We will start integrating a new and improved community identity authentication system into City services, and we’ll show our partners in other bureaus how they can benefit from these tools.
The road ahead
As you can see, we have a lot on our plate this year, but that’s not everything. We’re also working with teams across the City on mapping, communications, and procurement. We're partnering with the new City Council to make sure they have the digital tools they need to do Portland’s legislative work. And of course, we're hard at work on all the regular development and maintenance of a website you might have heard of called Portland.gov, and its kid sibling website, the employee intranet. We think of these as lifelines between the City of Portland and our community.
Although our team is pretty new, we’re working at full speed to deliver on our vision of a seamless digital experience for all Portlanders.
And if we get a few extra moments, maybe we can dream up some more Digital Services swag?
Or perhaps that can wait until 2026.