Inquiry Areas
Our research was organized around distinct questions for each participant group. With residents, we asked: How do New Yorkers currently find and access City services — and what makes those experiences easy or frustrating? What channels do they prefer, and why? With City leaders and staff, we explored: What is working and what isn’t in building and maintaining digital services? What institutional barriers stand in the way? With civic tech experts, we asked: What principles and strategies should anchor the City’s digital future — especially for residents with the least access? And across all three groups: What does excellent digital service delivery look like, and where does New York City fall short?

What We Heard
Across our conversations with residents, we heard consistently that time and money scarcity shape how people engage with City services. New Yorkers with the least margin in their lives bore the heaviest burden when services were hard to find, difficult to navigate, or required multiple in-person visits. Complex language, opaque processes, and a lack of proactive outreach contributed to cognitive overload, causing some residents to give up before accessing the help they needed. Many were unaware of services they were eligible for, and inconsistent information across City websites made it hard to get reliable answers. Some residents — particularly immigrants and communities of color — also expressed wariness about sharing personal information with the government, and community-based organizations played an outsized role as cultural and linguistic navigators for those who couldn’t or didn’t want to interact directly with City systems.

From City staff and civic tech experts, we heard about the structural challenges undermining service delivery from within. Incompatible back-end systems made coordination between agencies difficult, and inconsistent design standards meant the digital experience varied widely depending on which agency a resident encountered. Staff who lacked tools, training, or authority were less able to design and implement innovative solutions — even when they understood clearly what residents needed.

We also heard about what was working. The City’s 311 phone line and app were cited as examples of resident-centered service with a genuine customer-service culture — a model that could be extended to other agencies. Residents and experts alike pointed to social media, search engines, and mobile-first design as promising channels to meet New Yorkers where they already were. And nearly universal mobile phone ownership opened a practical pathway: text messaging, in particular, was seen as a viable and preferred channel for reaching residents without smartphones or consistent internet access.