Digital Services wins national award for innovation

This December, Digital Services will accept the Innovation in Constraints Award at the 2025 Digital Service Champions Awards. Presented by U.S. Digital Response, a nonprofit that supports human-centered technology work in the public sector, the award will honor the Bureau of Technology Services (BTS) Digital Services' work with Portland Permitting & Development (PP&D) to improve the user experience of the permitting website.

The Innovation in Constraints award is for teams who made meaningful improvements for the public despite budget, technical, or regulatory constraints. For Digital Services, those challenges included dense, jargon-heavy permitting pages, a sometimes-confusing user experience, and Portland's well-known permitting complexities. The team tackled those problems head-on by collaborating with users and stakeholders to rethink how people find, understand, and use permitting information.

Plain language, human-centered design, and proven components from the U.S. Web Design System now simplify the information experience for several common residential and commercial project types. The team created new webpage templates, tooltips, and interactive project guides to make permitting information easier to navigate and understand, while preserving the accuracy required by complex regulations.

"Groundbreaking" was one word a subject matter expert used to describe one of the new project guides. "It's seriously a big deal, and so helpful," they said.

Digital Services wishes to thank the following groups, whose efforts are reflected in our acceptance of this award:

• Bureau of Technology Services leadership, for prioritizing a human-centered, outcomes-based, One City approach to service delivery.
• Permitting & Development, for their commitment to customer service and their hard work in forging strong, collaborative partnerships. Multiple teams of project specialists and over 50 subject matter experts made valuable contributions to this project.
• All the users and community members who provided their time, insights, feedback, and suggestions. In more ways than one, they are the reason for this project's success.

As Digital Services concludes our engagement with PP&D, we seek to support their work as trusted advisors, and to build new collaborative partnerships across the City and in the community. We believe that when we partner with the public, we can co-create innovative solutions that improve public services for everyone.

Join us at the awards ceremony on Tuesday, December 2, at 12:00 p.m. Pacific.

Interested in working with us? We help groups across the City develop human-centered improvements to service delivery. Reach out to us at digital.services@portlandoregon….