Self Service portal for Seattle residents
City of Seattle’s Utility self-service portal is a one stop-shop for its half million+ customers where they can make all transactions, including paying bills, online. Built to replace the fragmented and confusing offline processes, I designed a one-in-all solution for convenience, efficiency and speed. The overall goal was to make the residents’ lives easier as well as make the City staff’s processes leaner and efficient.
MY ROLE
Product Strategy
Product Design
Content Strategy
Wireframes
Prototyping
Design Systems
Usability Testing
COMPANY
City of Seattle
Creating an end-to-end seamless experience
I led the end-to-end design of the portal by working with various internal and external partners and bridging existing third party applications with the new experience and making the application utility-agnostic. Regardless of where a features was hosted (internally or third party), the customer could now perform any transaction for any utility in one seamless, integrated session.
More features on your fingertips
Multiple critical features were designed from scratch and integrated into the portal to ensure quick and easy access for the customers. These features relieved a huge pain point for customers who were required to call the call center or apply in person at the center to access these services.
Focus on accessibility
Accessibility is at the core of City of Seattle’s digital vision. To this effect, the portal was designed to be accessible on all devices. Also, language support was integrated for key languages identified by the diversity team. Finally we also performed usability testing with visually-impaired customers to validate our design accessibility.
Finer details and the final product
Precise design components were created as part of the design library to create visual consistency and cohesiveness across features. This included components for desktop and mobile devices.
Results
~140K
new services started for customers since launch in Spring 2021.
80%
of all residential customer transactions are made on the portal rather than call center, thereby reducing call center costs.
90%
of all residential customer transactions fully automated with the integration of new features in the new portal, making the process faster and more efficient for customers.
60%
of all commercial transactions performed were completed on the portal since its first launch in Spring 2020.