Why civic technology needs fewer dashboards
the extra dashboard problem
i keep seeing public services add another dashboard, another login, another place for residents to check whether something happened. for transit riders, that can mean tracking a bus, reporting a blocked stop, confirming an elevator outage, and then repeating the same details elsewhere.
good civic technology should reduce administrative friction, not distribute it across four polished interfaces. i may be missing a useful reason for the fragmentation, but the design test seems simple: can someone solve the problem from a phone, quickly, without learning the agency’s internal structure?