Multi-Tiered Business Evaluation Tool
Service Design · UX Research · B2B Platform
City of Seattle — Office of Economic Development
Redesigning how city staff support 7,000+ small businesses, from first survey to referral, on a tier‑based evaluation platform.
Role
Service Designer, Analyst
Duration
Sep 2024 – Aug 2025 · shipped internally May 2025
Stack
Microsoft Power Apps · Forms · Power BI · Outlook
Team
Program Manager · Small Business Advocate · Project Manager · UX Designer · Data Analyst
The shipped tool in twenty seconds: tier scores, a to-do list, milestones and the journal for one business.
The Problem
Seven thousand businesses, tracked one spreadsheet at a time.
OED runs consulting for small businesses across Seattle. Staff assessed each one by hand, with data scattered across spreadsheets and siloed notes and no central system. Support was slow to arrive and rarely specific to the business.
7,000+
Businesses served
Each assessed by hand by OED consulting staff
76%
Food-related
Restaurants and food trucks whose needs cluster — yet every evaluation started from zero
0
Central system
Records lived in personal spreadsheets and siloed notes.
The service blueprint — six stages from survey to referral. Most delays happen in the hand-offs between layers. City of Redmond’s parallel process is mapped for reference.
One framework, one dashboard, one shared record.
As the service designer on the OED team, I led the design of the service package: a tier framework scalable enough to cover most consulting cases, a centralized dashboard that replaces the scattered spreadsheets, and a journal that keeps every consultation on record.
The three requirements, as framed at the start of the project.
Design Process
01 · Research
Stakeholder interviews
Literature review
Internal users
Touchpoint investigation
02 · Field Study
External users
Tier system structure
03 · Wireframing
Low-fi dashboard
Information clarity
04 · Validation
Mid-fi dashboard
Usability testing
05 · System Design
Survey design
Hi-fi dashboard
Service experience
06 · Launch
Shipped internally, May 2025
Research — Staff
Staff didn’t want more data. They wanted to see business health at a glance.
I ran 12 staff interviews and reviewed the requirements document. Ten of the twelve raised the same three needs the tool would have to meet:
01
A summary view of each business, at a glance.
02
A clear, personalized action plan for every owner.
03
A way to see where a business stands: its overall health level.
Three roles: OED staff run the evaluations, owners provide the data, TA providers receive the referrals.
Research — Field study
Business owners wanted next steps, not advice.
Owners aren’t the tool’s primary users, but they feed it through an intake form. In the field study, most asked for concrete next steps, not general advice. After the interviews I ran a system-design workshop with the PM and OED staff, where we settled on the intake form as the tool’s main input.
The intake form, before and after — the redesign carries the framework’s six categories.
The Framework
Five tiers, six categories — and the weakest category decides the score.
Card-sorting workshops grouped business challenges into categories. Stakeholder workshops aligned on what progression looks like. Iterative refinement narrowed it to five tiers, validated with staff against real businesses.
One rule does the heavy lifting: a business’s overall tier is set by its lowest category, and it advances only when every criterion of the next tier is met. The lowest score tells an owner exactly what to fix next.
Tier 1
Foundations
The basics — a business license, a device, an EIN.
Tier 2
Community Presence
Visible to customers — a website, a POS system, more than cash.
Tier 3
Survivor
Running steadily — payroll, taxes, structured hours.
Tier 4
Stabilized
Built to operate — a brand, a budget, a database, a strategy.
Tier 5
Thriving
Ready to scale — automation, new markets, bigger buyers.
Top: the raw boards from the card-sorting workshops, one per tier. Below: the same 47 markers distilled — a business climbs by clearing its weakest category.
The Dashboard
Why a radar chart?
Because staff read six things in one glance.
Wireframes went through stakeholder review, where the layout moved to a bento grid, then mid-fi and hi-fi prototypes. Tested against bar and line charts with 15 OED staff, the radar was the clear preference: all six categories in one view, mapped naturally onto the tier logic.
40%
Faster priority identification
vs. the previous tabular format, in the same usability tests
Design Iterations
01 · First wireframe
A radar chart claiming half the layout — six categories in one glance.
↓
02 · After stakeholder reviews
A bento layout, a secondary chart and six progress indicators, added on reviewer feedback.
↓
03 · Under testing
Usability testing pushed back: the extras crowded the radar. The second chart and checkboxes came out.
↓
04 · The handoff
What survived testing — the radar, the to-do list, and a journal.
Evaluation to Action
The dashboard finds the gaps. The to-do list turns them into next steps.
In usability sessions, staff kept describing the friction of switching between businesses across spreadsheets and scattered notes. Business lookup moved into one place, and a checkbox to-do list turns each evaluation into next steps — consistent across categories and easy to track over time.
Centralized lookup — every business in one place.
The evaluation dashboard — the business’s tier overview, with a to-do checklist that turns gaps into next steps.
Notes, follow-ups, milestones — every consultation logged in place.
OED’s service is consulting-based, so the tool had to work as a shared team record, not just a display. The journal at the bottom of each dashboard fills that role. In testing, staff also reported greater confidence that no client detail would be overlooked.
85%
Easier consultation prep
Of the 12 staff in journal usability testing
−44%
Time in external spreadsheets
Measured across the same sessions
The journal — browse past consultation milestones by month, ready for the next follow-up.
Logging a new milestone under any health category.
Result & Impact
Shipped May 2025. Referrals a third faster.
After 15+ rounds of trial testing, the platform went into official internal use in May 2025. The tier framework covers 80% of OED’s consulting use cases.
35%
Faster referrals
Across the 7,000+ businesses OED serves
+30%
Data accuracy
From structured intake and single-source records
92%
Better daily efficiency
Reported by trial users ahead of the internal launch
What I Learned
Three lessons I’d take to the next team.
01
A framework that covers 80% beats a taxonomy that covers everything. The five tiers came out of card-sorting workshops with staff, not from theory.
02
In government, the tool is only half the service; adoption is the other half. Design reviews, QA checkpoints and shared component guidelines cut design miscommunication by 73%.
03
Ship inside the stack people already trust. Building on Power Apps meant no new logins, no procurement cycle, and no training burden.
What’s Next
The framework serves food businesses today — the rest of Seattle is next.
Three directions worth pursuing: extending the tier framework beyond food-related businesses; predictive insights built on the milestone data; and automated referrals with deeper cross-department collaboration.
© 2026 Sam Wang