Oakland Digital Services

We're a small, mostly part-time team of designers, content strategists, and developers. We work with City staff to improve digital services for the public.

About

This Citywide team works with City staff and community members to:

  • Lead community research and engagement
  • Design digital services that meet community needs
  • Define policies, metrics and standards for the user experience
  • Make government data more accessible and usable
  • Inform the selection and adoption of digital tools for better decision making

We follow three core principles:

  1. Equity. Our messages are disseminated in a way that reaches the breadth of our community. We achieve equity through ongoing user testing and research.
  2. Simplicity of Services. Our City services, policies and procedures are easy for the community to understand. We achieve simplicity by using short sentences and simple words, which are more easily translated into other languages.
  3. Trust. Our words should convey a sense of credibility as a trusted source of information for the Oakland community. We achieve this by ensuring our information is accurate, consistent and reliable.