To design good services, I…
am resourceful
plain language | digital design | low-budget solutions
The lesson: There will always be constraints in your service delivery. Accept that and you’ll see there’s more than one way to achieve your outcome.
Work product: www.frontdoor.dc.gov
I played a significant role in producing this website, but the final product is the result of collaboration with colleagues because service design is a team sport.
The backstory: The District offers over 50 resources to support current and future homeowners with mortgage payments, renovations, repairs, homebuying, taxes, and more. But these resources are provided by 14 agencies with no central point for residents to find them. At the request of the City Administrator, my team inventoried programs, mapped their processes, and generated plain language descriptions of each to live in a central website–Front Door.
Our team partnered with the District’s in-house IT team. We’d design the content and they’d do the custom .net build. The price tag for the build–$250k.
Then COVID happened. Agency budgets were squeezed and our budget got repurposed. We had to be resourceful if we were still going to deliver. Without developers on my team we leaned on off-the-shelf solutions. We used a form building tool–Alchemer–to create an interactive resource finder to help residents comb through the 50 services. For the site itself, we used Wix to host. These tools not only allowed us to deliver without coding expertise, but because our staff time was funded we produced the site for less than $3k.
What at first felt like a compromise ended up ensuring the sustainability of the tool. Now anyone with baseline digital literacy can tweak and update the site. While bespoke builds have their place, this project underscored that they aren’t the only way. A resourceful designer sees more than one way to deliver.
