Boston Digital Service
Millions of people interact with the City of Boston digitally each year to do everything from finding information on City services to paying a parking ticket. We believe these experiences should be easy to navigate and accessible.
Our team is focused on partnering with City departments to improve service delivery across the City. We’re a cross-functional team with a mission to:
- improve the user experience of existing digital services
- better engage and communicate with our residents, and
- build new systems to improve how the City delivers services online.
Digital Team resources
We've worked a lot on redesigning the digital face of the City of Boston.
Find out about the visual identity for the City of Boston.
What to do — and what not to do — when writing content.
We have tips and templates to help you shoot great video for the City.
If we don’t know what people need, we will not build the right thing.
Stay up to date on our work and contribute your code.
Our guiding principles
In building Boston.gov, we spoke to City Hall workers, residents, and outsiders to find out what they would want from City government. Those conversations helped create the four strategic principles that guide the work we do:
What would a helpful human do? We want to empathize and react based on context, knowing when to guide and make suggestions and when to just direct and step aside.
Equal parts warm and officialWe’re trying to create a place that feels approachable with a clear guide for finding information, getting something done, and taking action. This tone needs to balance professional with friendly, official with open.
We need to organize our work through the user’s perspective. We don’t want residents to hunt and gather everything.
Build an energizing environmentWe hope to inspire our constituents, whether they’re completing a transaction, learning something new, or just looking to get more engaged with government.