Plays
A digital service should fulfill a resident need, be outcome-driven, and align to the City of Chicago’s vision for technology. It requires a clear understanding of the problem and who will benefit from the solution. From the outset, the design of the service must promote and accommodate accessibility, inclusion, and diversity.
- What is the resident need addressed by this service? What can digital delivery improve?
- What pain points and roadblocks currently exist in the delivery and use of this service?
- Who are the target users and who else may use this service? What are their needs for accessibility?
- What research needs to be conducted to better understand user behavior? How will diverse perspectives be collected?
- What are the metrics for success and how will they be measured?
- How does the development of this digital service fit within the City’s IT vision?
- Map out the service delivery as it exists.
- Identify the audience for the service, using data if possible.
- Spend time with users and identify existing pain points and roadblocks.
- Understand why digital is necessary and confirm alignment with City of Chicago’s IT vision.
- Develop metrics for success, project progress, equitable access, and maximum user adoption.
Audience: The core set of users targeted to use the service. Audience can be segmented by age, gender, income as well as motivation for using the service.
User: Those who take part in the service.
Needs: What the user wants to see as the outcome.
Pain points: What stops users from accomplishing what they want to do.
Accessibility: Designing so that the greatest number of users can view your content. Accessibility planning aids all users’ experience.
- City of Chicago Design Methods – Build a greater understanding of your problem and the people it impacts
- Discovery Tools from 18F (design consultancy within U.S. Government) - Understand target user-group problems
- City & County of San Francisco - Working with stakeholders to fully understand how to improve SF’s pandemic response
- New York City – Deployed a service process to better understand client experiences with NYC and its partners to reduce homelessness
Early collaboration is the key to building consistent, high-quality digital services. Key stakeholders must work together to define priorities and build a roadmap that will lead to successful deployments. DTI will provide guidance on potential partners and technologies.
- Have you identified a product owner from the department to support the project?
- Have you considered what technology solutions are best fits for the service?
- Have you determined outcomes, deliverables and what success will look like?
- Do you have a contract in place or dedicated funds?
- Work with Digital Services to determine if the project can be done internally or if using a vendor will produce the best result. Digital Services can help determine if existing technology will fit the need, if new technology must be acquired. or if the solution is best supported without technology (e.g., process change).
- Work through the process together with clear communication and product owner involvement.
- Confirm your plan includes testing on accessibility, design, security, user experience, and other requirements necessary for successful deployments.
Product Owner Requirements:
- Authority to make rapid decisions to maintain the speed of agile delivery
- Dedicate time to development
- daily stand-ups
- planning meetings and retrospectives
- sprint reviews
- Approve use-cases
- Work with Digital Services/vendor to gather end-user feedback
- Product Owner Role - Key Responsibilities for Digital Service development
- Project/PM – coordinate meetings and testing for accessibility, design, security, and other requirements necessary for successful deployments.
Human-centered design means designers and developers create intuitive, convenient digital services to solve real problems. The final design will adhere to accessibility best practices to ensure all people can use the service..
- Is the user experience as simple as possible and minimizes data entry?
- Can users succeed the first time without help and obtain the information they are looking for?
- Is the design style consistent with the city’s related digital services?
- How have accessibility principles been incorporated into the design?
- Have insights from research and user conversations been incorporated into the design?
- Ensure accessibility is incorporated into the final product.
- Use language that is familiar to the user and easy to understand.
- Integrate the service with offline touch points and ways to request help.
- Review the service on all channels—online and offline—that the users will use.
- Give clear and accurate information about what the service is and how to use it.
Human centered design is a problem-solving technique that puts real people at the center of the development process, allowing the creation of services tailored to your audience's needs.
Use Case is a description of ways an end-user wants to "use" a service. It provides a situation in which a service could be used to gather end-user feedback.
- City of Chicago – Interview approach with users and key stakeholders to help with consensus and clarity on problem focus
- Use-Case Elements, Benefits and Creation
- 10 general principles, or "heuristics" to evaluate successful digital experiences
Get working software into users’ hands quickly and iterate and apply adjustments based on user feedback. Iteration reduces risk and increases the likelihood the digital service will meet users’ needs.
- Have you partnered with DTI to work on an agile development project before?
- Have you defined a rapid approach for collecting user feedback to inform decision making during the build phase of the project?
- Have you identified a testing process to quickly confirm usability and improvement areas?
- Use an agile, iterative approach for development, where user scenarios are used to better define and simplify the experience.
- Develop quick visualizations to more clearly understand where to make improvements.
- Use proof-of-concepts and pilot programs to test, iterate and confirm target outcomes.
- Test for usability often with actual and potential users.
- Make sure the planned service helps the user achieve the goal as simply as possible.
Agile: a method of software development using short phases of work and frequent reviews and reworking of plan
Agile Principles:
- Drive activities using use cases
- Don’t slow down delivery
- Make decisions when they’re needed, at the right level
- Do it with the right people
- Only do it if adds value
- Trust and verify
Proof-of-Concepts use agile approaches to confirm success criteria (user experience, use-case validation, estimated costs and resources, technologies, etc.) within a limited-time scope (4-6 weeks).
- Example of City of Chicago website analytics analysis
- Sample Task Order Request (TOR) with agile project process
- Visual Examples – Figma UX for mobile app and Organics Campaign
Data should be used to drive decisions and track performance during the design, development, and operation of the digital service. Furthermore, all data generated by digital service solutions is the City of Chicago’s responsibility to protect. Digital services must be designed and developed to protect sensitive information and keep city systems secure.
- What data is available to help inform design decisions and what needs to be collected?
- What are the key metrics for the service to measure performance?
- What data will be collected? Will any of it contain private or sensitive information?
- Have you reviewed and applied the City of Chicago data retention and security guidelines?
- Find open-source data related to the service to help inform the design process.
- Make non-personal, non-commercially sensitive data available to other services and the public.
- Establish key performance indicators and determine how related data will be collected.
- Review the city’s information and security guidelines early in the design process.
- Ensure user data and information requirements meet the City of Chicago’s security and legal standards.
- When a service requires data from a customer, include consent that complies with City of Chicago Privacy Policy.
- Right-size data protections to help keep digital services open and enable a seamless experience.
Public trust: expectation that governments work for the people and will protect their data and private information
Data security: protecting digital data, such as those in a database, from destructive forces and from the unwanted actions of unauthorized users, such as a cyberattack or a data breach
Data privacy: how and where digital data is stored as well as shared with third parties, particularly personal and sensitive information.
- Department of Business Affairs and Consumer Protection conducts a digital survey of public chauffeurs (taxi, limo, rideshare drivers). Anonymized survey results are published on our City of Chicago’s Open Data Portal for both the department, drivers, riders, the public at large to analyze and identify areas for improved services and policies.
- City’s information & security guidelines
- Bloomberg Cities Network: How Better Digital Services Can Build Trust in Local Government
- DTI cybersecurity team