06/17/2025 | News release | Distributed by Public on 06/17/2025 13:09
In October of 2024, a newly formed Digital Services began working with Portland Permitting and Development (PP&D) to improve the customer experience of their permitting website. After hearing frustrations from the community about the complexity of the permitting process, PP&D engaged Digital Services to help reimagine how customers could get the information they need to successfully apply for a permit.
"The process is very hard to follow," said one permit applicant in a customer satisfaction survey. "Website is difficult to navigate and garbled with too much information that one typically does not need," said another.
To help address issues like this, Digital Services began interviewing community members and users of the site to get a better idea of the problems they encountered. At what points did they become frustrated? Where did they get lost? What information did they need, and when?
Using insights from these interviews and building on the work of an outside agency and customer research conducted by PP&D, Digital Services developed these key takeaways:
After discovering and defining the problems customers faced, Digital Services began to develop solutions.
Getting a permit involves more than just a website. Projects need to follow City code, State code, and filter through the expertise of the City's specialists, examiners, and inspectors. Supporting this work is a complex web of technologies that make their interactions with customers possible. Even a quick look at the technologies that support PP&D can start to make you dizzy.
Some of the technologies PP&D uses to administer the permitting program.While PP&D's work spans many tools and processes, Digital Services focused their efforts on Portland.gov, their main digital product, because it's the gateway for all interactions customers might have with PP&D.
With over 4,000 pages of content, documents, and images, it's also the main source of information customers have to navigate the permitting process and the technologies that support it.
To start on this problem, Digital Services' Designer and User Researcher Evan Bowers began exploring possible new designs that could afford a better user experience, based on his conversations with them.
"Our research suggested new design patterns and templates could help our customers," he says. "With so much information, the structure of the page and the site could make for a tricky experience."
With a redesign in mind, Bowers and the team that develops Portland.gov knew they didn't need to create a new site from scratch. Instead, they could use web elements like menus, arrows, and expandable rows that were developed for the United States Web Design System, then integrate them into Portland.gov.
The benefit to using these web elements is that they already include state-of-the-art considerations for usability and accessibility. That means people of all abilities will find them easy to use.
"We could use existing, tested design patterns to simplify some of the complexities of the user journey," Bowers says.
Beyond a new look and feel of the user experience, Digital Services needed to develop tools that were completely new to Portland.gov. After rigorous research, testing, and collaboration with stakeholders in PP&D and throughout the City, Digital Services' developers rolled out these new website features to help customers navigate the permitting process:
Simplifying complex processes like those in permitting goes beyond website navigation and tools. While these essential pieces of the puzzle were getting figured out, the team also had to reimagine the information that the webpages would contain.
"I'll just tell you," said one user of the permitting pages, "it seems pretty overwhelming."
To make the information more usable, the content team took two approaches:
It's in this second approach that the new site tools and design showcase their strengths, allowing pages to conceal and reveal information, depending on its relevance to someone's specific project. Now, pages can present information to users in a way that's more manageable than a long page of complex text.
In the course of revising pages, the content team began working with over 50 different subject matter experts in PP&D to make sure information stays accurate and relevant. Those experts bring first-hand experience and deep knowledge of the permitting process, construction, and PP&D customers.
In some ways, the PP&D web pages reflect that knowledge, as vast and detailed as it is.
"We had to create a tailored information experience," says Nathan Barbarick, a content strategist for Digital Services. "The average customer has one goal in mind: finish the project. There's so much information they don'tcare about, and if we can leave that out, we're much closer to simplifying their experience."
It's part of Digital Services' process to keep testing and iterating on the work already done. Although the new residential deck pages are published, they'll keep changing as the team incorporates new elements of the permitting process, learns more about how customers use the site, and as new features roll out.
See the new permit pages for residential decks.
Beyond residential decks, the Digital Services and PP&D will continue their efforts, building interactive questions and new pages for simple bathroom permits, vending carts, tenant improvements with change of occupancy, and ADU conversions by the end of 2025.
About Digital Services: Housed within the Bureau of Technology Services, Digital Services partners with groups to understand community needs and to make digital services easier for Portlanders to find and use. The team manages and develops Portland.gov, the employee intranet, and a supports numerous projects across the City.
Want to help us out? Jump in the pool of user research testers and help us make City services work for everyone. Send us an email at research@portlandoregon.gov.