Helping an EU capital city redesign its public service information & access portal
A more usable, accessible portal for citywide public services
The challenge
A capital city government in the EU runs one of its most heavily used digital touchpoints: the portal where citizens, visitors, municipalities, and public service organisations come to find and access public services. The team faced two intertwined problems. On the demand side, they had to serve a very wide range of users — long-time residents, transient visitors, and people with different abilities — each arriving with different mental models and needs. On the supply side, content and ownership were fragmented across government units, municipalities, and service organisations, each with their own logic and language. The portal had grown rich in information and poor in usability, and the team needed a way to tame the complexity without flattening what made each service distinct.
Our approach
We led a user-centered redesign of the portal, anchored in the actual jobs people came to it to do. Research spanned the full spread of user groups, with particular attention to accessibility — designing search and filtering mechanisms that worked for people with a range of abilities, treated as a first-class part of the experience from the start. We worked through findability, discoverability, and the language of services in parallel, mapping where the gap between "information exists" and "people can actually use it" was widest. On the infrastructure side, we helped scope new integrations between public datasets — transport, mapping, and service registries — so that the portal could surface live, contextual information rather than static directory entries.
The result
The redesigned portal is meaningfully more usable for the everyday citizen and significantly more accessible for people with different abilities. The data integrations that came out of the project — connecting transport, mapping, and other public datasets — became a blueprint for similar initiatives across the city's digital estate. Beyond the immediate UX gains, the work strengthened public trust in the city's infrastructure: a more transparent, efficient, and responsive surface for government, with measurable impact on the actual use of public services it was built to enable.
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