How many different types of digital services can you fit in one city?

Over the past years, the City of Tampere has created and accumulated a large number of digital services. Currently, there are around 100 digital channels available to residents. On top of this, there are city's internal systems and services for businesses, bringing the total to around 250. In the absence of uniform practices, many of these services may only share the city's logo. However, each service is an important part of the digital customer experience. When a large number of digital services have been created over the years and very few, if any, common design principles have been used, this is bound to cause confusion among service users.

Let's think about it from the perspective of a resident. For example, a resident can do the following things using the City of Tampere's digital services: buy tickets to the swimming pool, search for parking spaces, reserve books from the library, book a badminton court, sign up for exercise classes, or report faults in the city's infrastructure. All of these are done in services that look different and work differently.

Although digital services have similar elements, such as menus, buttons and text input fields, they may nevertheless function differently and give different responses when used. Some buttons flash and change colour when pressed, others do nothing. In some services the main menu is visible, in others it is hidden. Some at the top, some on the left. And so on. Simply achieving the desired goal in a service can feel like a voyage of discovery, when you can't know in advance how the service will work without trying it.

So why do city digital services work in different ways and not look alike? It's a good question, and basically it's because the city is a large, multi-sector organization where different actors have developed services without common design practices and often in very independent projects. When investing in the digital customer experience, common processes must be created for design. 

The city wants to provide its residents and other customers of city services with digital services that are recognisable, seamless, consistent and accessible.

How do we achieve this? The first steps have already been taken. In late 2024, the City of Tampere's Digitalisation and Information Management group strated developing its own design system to meet this challenge.