Washington Customer Portal: A Digital Government Network Spotlight

Background

As governments at all levels across the U.S. seek to transform service delivery with digital tools, they confront the same fundamental problem: people interfacing with government services experience a tangled web of websites, logins, and applications that rarely feel coordinated. In Washington State, for example, simple tasks like renewing a license required repeating the same steps across multiple portals, forms, and departments. That reality set the stage for the Washington Customer Portal, a new statewide initiative designed to unify digital service access through a single point of access that connects residents to the information and support they need— no matter which agency provides it.

To learn more, we talked to three public servants shaping the state’s digital transformation through this project: Wendy Wickstrom, Washington Technology Solution’s (WaTech) chief digital experience officer, who leads the division responsible for the products residents and businesses use to interact with government; Jesse Jones, director of Your Washington, the state’s customer experience agency; and Hannah Burn, WaTech’s government customer experience leader.

The Team Behind the WA Customer Portal

Behind every product that feels simple is a complex web of collaboration. At WaTech, that effort began with user research. Wickstrom’s team conducted one of the largest statewide customer experience studies in agency history, surveying over 1,400 residents to understand where frustration lived. “The data showed us exactly where people were getting lost,” she said. From there, they developed personas and journey maps to model how real residents moved through various government systems and services.

That research also informed a new procurement process to build the Customer Portal. Instead of a traditional RFP, WaTech used a “challenge procurement”—a faster, more collaborative process that allowed multiple vendors to co-design solutions during procurement to better evaluate vendors’ capabilities and efficacy. Within six months, the selected vendor helped deliver a full product roadmap.

At the same time, Burn and the newly-formed Digital Experience Division began to operationalize a human-centered design strategy for the portal.

Jones, a former investigative consumer reporter and now director of Your Washington, serves as the bridge between this design effort and statewide agency engagement. His office was established to make customer experience a shared enterprise goal. Your Washington functions as the central coordination hub for customer experience in the state, working with WaTech to ensure the Customer Portal reflects consistent service standards across agencies.

Jones also leads Customer Experience Cohorts, or small cross-agency groups that bring together practitioners to share challenges, test ideas, and learn from each other’s tools. “Government has brilliant people,” he said, “but they rarely talk to each other. Through our customer experience cohorts, we’re breaking that down.” These cohorts created an ecosystem of collaboration around the Customer Portal, ensuring that when the platform launches, agencies are not just users but contributors. Together, the team’s cross-functional leadership—combining digital strategy, user research, and customer experience alignment—made the Customer Portal possible.

WA Customer Portal: Helping People Wayfind in Government Services

For decades, Washington residents seeking to renew a license, apply for benefits, or start a business needed to move through an obstacle course of digital and analog forms, passwords, and portals—each designed in isolation, none speaking to the other. That’s what the Washington Customer Portal set out to change. The idea wasn’t to build another website; it was to redesign how the state as a whole interacted with residents.

The vision began with Washington’s Chief Information Officer Bill Kehoe, who imagined what it would mean for government to function as one connected enterprise. He sought out systems that anticipated user needs and moved seamlessly between steps. “If private companies can recognize your address and preferences instantly,” Kehoe argued, “why can’t the state recognize that same person when they renew a license or apply for a benefit?”

That question became the foundation for a new philosophy of public service delivery, treating people as participants, not transactions. Wickstrom, who leads WaTech’s Digital Experience Division, framed it this way: “Hundreds of services are provided by individual agencies, but residents shouldn’t have to know which one to go to. Our job is to connect them, to make government feel like a single experience rather than 200 separate systems.” The Customer Portal represents that connection point. It’s a single interface designed to make government accessible, anticipatory, and accountable.

Hundreds of services are provided by individual agencies, but residents shouldn’t have to know which one to go to. Our job is to connect them, to make government feel like a single experience rather than 200 separate systems.”

Jesse Jones
Chief Digital Experience Officer, WaTech

Jones explained the governor’s belief that “customer experience is the front porch of government,” adding that “when people have good experiences with government, they see it differently. They see it as something that works for them, not against them.” In practice, this means more than convenience. It means a state that sees residents as whole people, not as case numbers divided by department.

Before WA Customer Portal: SecureAccess Washington

To understand the ambition of the Customer Portal, it helps to look back at its predecessor: SecureAccess Washington (SAW), the state’s first-generation digital gateway. When Wickstrom joined WaTech in the early 2000s, SAW was revolutionary. It was one of the first single sign-on (SSO) systems in the country, giving residents a centralized way to login to government services. “When it was designed decades ago,” Wickstrom said, “many agencies didn’t even have websites. Back then, SecureAccess Washington was the front door to government.”

But as digital ecosystems evolved, so did the problem. Agencies began building their own sites, tools, and databases. Over time, the once-innovative portal became little more than a “link farm,” according to Wickstrom. She raised the question, “What’s our value now?”

For Wickstrom, the answer was clear: The portal needed to evolve from a directory to a guide. Through user research, the team discovered that residents needed help with complex, cross-agency processes. Both internal customers,—from other agencies—and end-users expressed dissatisfaction with SAW. They also learned that the outdated design eroded trust. “When people landed on SAW,” Burn said, “they questioned if it was legitimate. People hesitated to enter their information. It wasn’t built with user research or modern design. It was a relic of its time.”

So, the Customer Portal team set out to build on SAW’s original idea of a unified sign-on, reimagining it for today.

Testing and Iteration

When developing Customer Portal, the team adopted a continuous testing model, embedding usability research into every stage of design. “We invited residents to complete real tasks, like finding child care programs, and then observed where they got stuck,” Burn explained. Those sessions uncovered blind spots that would have been invisible from inside the government. One example was that the first prototype grouped services under categories like “health” or “transportation,” which made sense to them, but users showed that they instead thought of their goals and frustrations, leading to a redesign.

Testing also included accessibility audits, security reviews, and system-wide performance tests to ensure the portal met modern standards. Before onboarding agencies, Your Washington hosted internal pilots to help teams learn how to use the shared tools and measure resident satisfaction. Jones described these as “mini-labs for government,” spaces where cross-agency groups could experiment together.

Even small details, like naming, were informed by research. Early in development, the team playfully proposed calling their chatbot, a customer-facing tool on the portal that serves as a conversational chat for user requests or questions, “Bigfoot Bot.” “People laughed,” Burn said, “but they didn’t trust it. They saw Bigfoot as folklore, not authority. We changed it to AskWA—professional, clear, and aligned with our brand.”

Essential Features and Functionalities

At its core, the Customer Portal functions as a unified experience layer across state services. Instead of asking residents to memorize which agency handles which task, the portal organizes everything around the user’s intent.

The search experience is central to this change. The new Customer Portal aspires to leverage a conversational chatbot to support the search experience that leverages GenAI, addressing queries like “I lost my job” or “I need to start a day care.” Every service is tagged according to life events and eligibility factors, allowing the site to make connections that were once invisible. For example, a small business owner researching state tax registration might now see guidance on required labor laws, workplace safety programs, and funding resources, all pulled dynamically from different departments, Wickstrom said. Burn explained that this approach came from the realization that “people shouldn’t have to know government vocabulary to find what they need. The system should meet them in their language.”

The technical stack supporting all this is intentionally lightweight and scalable. The front end uses modular components built to the U.S. Web Design System, while the back end is containerized and cloud-native, able to evolve as new services and integrations come online. This promotes resiliency and future-proofing that SecureAccess Washington lacked. Accessibility standards ensure that the portal works for everyone, including residents using screen readers or translated content.

Trust has also been a guiding value from day one. Each interaction, from login to data storage, was designed to give residents full control. The state’s privacy office worked alongside WaTech to build transparent consent settings, where users can view, manage, or delete their information at any time. Every personalization feature can be toggled off, and the system is deliberately limited in what data it retains. “We wanted to prove that digital transformation doesn’t require surveillance,” Wickstrom noted. “You can design personalization without crossing privacy boundaries.”

The project remains underway, with a minimum viable product set to launch in 2026. This first version will allow residents to create a single Washington state account, leverage modern tools to login to services, and search all state services in one place. Future releases will follow quarterly, each building on user feedback. “Every release must deliver something meaningful,” Wickstrom said. “If people don’t see value, they won’t come back. Government can’t afford that kind of apathy.”

Lessons Learned

Ground your vision by the problems you address first. At its core, the portal’s development wasn’t about adopting new technology; it was about understanding why residents were getting lost in the first place. Instead of chasing the next tool or trend, or feeling wedded to the previous SecureAccess Washington solution, the team anchored every decision around the underlying problem: fragmented, confusing access to public services. That focus kept the project grounded and purposeful. “If you love your tool more than the pain it’s solving,” Jones said, “you’ve already lost your way.”

Start small and iterate continuously. Rather than waiting years for a “perfect” system, the team launched quick prototypes, gathered data, and improved in cycles. Putting the product in front of users early and often delivered immediate value while informing the next round. Wickstrom described this as “earning your scale.” “When you start small,” she said, “you make mistakes early, cheaply, and visibly, and that’s how you build confidence in your team and with the public.” The iterative approach helped shift internal culture from risk-avoidance to learning in the open—a quiet but transformative change in how government approaches digital delivery.