Service Design
What is Service Design?
Service Design is a human-centered methodology of understanding and organizing people, interactions, and processes to improve service quality and user experience for both employees and customers.
By integrating customer experience principles with business processes, service design can help public sector agencies identify opportunities to reduce costs while also boosting engagement and customer satisfaction.
Who We Are
We are a team of service designers with demonstrated expertise in design thinking. We are passionate about crafting efficient, delightful services that users can navigate with confidence.
What We Do
Identify Service Gaps
Use human-centered design to identify the needs and challenges of city departments and their customers and design solutions to address them.
Leverage Research and Data
Leverage user research to identify areas for improvement, guide solutioning, and measure impacts.
Refine Service Experience
Use real-world feedback and performance metrics to iterate design solutions to ensure relevance, effectiveness, and long-term service quality.
Values
Design for People First
Prioritize the needs and experiences of users, residents, and stakeholders to enhance service delivery for all involved.
Support City IT Priorities
Partner with departments and teams to strengthen services and solutions through human-centered design practices that improve new and existing experiences.
Equity and Inclusion
Committed to ensuring non-English speakers, people with disabilities, and members of diverse racial, ethnic, and cultural groups are designed for.
Our Work
Currently, our work is focused on improving internal IT services and employee experiences. Recent projects include automating HR leave request workflows, improving the annual employee review process, supporting the development of a new budget forecasting application for ITD employees, and enhancing IT tech stack communications to help departments better understand and navigate approved technology solutions. These efforts help streamline operations, reduce manual work, and create more user-centered internal systems.
As the practice grows, we aim to expand our work to support public-facing city services and resident experiences, applying human-centered design to improve how people interact with City programs and services.
Training & Presentations
We offer trainings and presentations that help teams build a human-centered mindset and create more effective, user-centered services, tools and solutions.
Our team partners with Talent & Development in IT to deliver a series of human-centered design trainings focused on practical tools, collaboration, and user-centered problem-solving. We also share a monthly “Tip of the Month” through internal IT communications to promote best practices, design thinking methods, and human-centered design activities that teams can apply to their work.
Timeline
Launched in March 2025, the Service Design Program aims to improve the user experience of city services beginning within the IT Department and expanding citywide over time.
Projects in 2025 include consulting on the enhancement of the organization's IT service request intake system and helping to define and test an AI-powered chatbot that answers common customer questions and connects them to support when needed.
In addition to identifying opportunities for service improvement, the team is responsible for building the program as well: defining best practices, developing processes, and laying the groundwork for long-term scalability and standardization.
The program also advises teams on measuring impacts and outcomes through tracking relevant metrics. Case studies from past projects will be published on this page soon.
2025
Establish the Program
Initial Pilot Consultations
2026
Standardize Process
Expand Scope, Citywide Consultations
2026 and beyond
Publish Case Studies
Show Measurable Impacts and Metrics
Looking Ahead
We're excited to serve all people in Seattle by helping to make government services easier to access, understand, and use. We design with a people-centered approach to create experiences that are delightful, inclusive, and effective for everyone.
