Get It Done, For The Rest Of Us
Extending San Diego's civic reporting app to the students who walk past the potholes every morning.
Overview
San Diego has an app called Get It Done. You take a photo of a pothole, broken streetlight, or pile of illegal dumping, the city receives the report, and someone eventually fixes it. Since 2016, it has received around 3.5 million service requests.
The app also requires anyone aged 13 to 17 to have an adult agree to its terms of service before they can use it. That seemed like a strange decision to me, because the group most likely to notice a broken bus stop on the way to school is the same group that has to ask a parent for permission before reporting it.
Our team thought that was worth looking into.
Ashley Padilla, Jonathan Ty, Julie Nguyen, Ruth Mazariego Lemus. COGS 127, Spring 2026.
I didn't pick this project because I had strong feelings about civic technology. I picked it because I've lived in San Diego long enough to walk past the same pothole on the same block for two years, and at some point I just stopped noticing it. I think most people who live here have a version of that story. The broken thing stops registering after a while, and you start to assume the street has always looked that way.
When we started looking into Get It Done, the demographic gap was interesting to me. There are roughly 205,000 residents aged 10 to 14 in San Diego County, and the app's terms more or less tell them to come back when they're older. At the same time, the Mid City CAN Youth Council recently helped secure $4.25 million to renovate a park in City Heights by showing up to council meetings in person. So it isn't that teenagers can't have an impact. The issue is that the digital infrastructure for it doesn't include them.
Middle and high school students in San Diego see city maintenance issues constantly. They notice them on the walk to school, on the bus, and at the parks they hang out at. But almost none of them report what they see. Sometimes it's because they don't know how, sometimes it's because they don't believe anything will come of it, and sometimes it's because the app doesn't feel like it was made with them in mind.
The current version of Get It Done, available on iOS and Android, works. You can submit a photo, drop a pin, choose a category, and track your request. It added a Spanish version in 2021, which felt like a meaningful step toward reaching more of the city. The core product is solid. The reach is the issue.
User Research
Our team interviewed six high school students, most of them at Sweetwater High School. They were seniors or close to it, and all of them lived in neighborhoods where the broken streetlight problem was a real thing rather than a hypothetical one. I personally ran two of these interviews, with Carlie and Kriselda.
Going into the interviews, I expected to hear that teenagers wanted to report things and just didn't know how. That ended up being part of the story, but not the whole story.
None of the six interviewees had heard of Get It Done before we showed it to them. I expected that.
What I didn't expect was how much they noticed. Every single person I talked to could list off problems in their neighborhood without thinking about it. Carlie went through graffiti on murals, homeless encampments, partial broken street signs, and dysfunctional streetlights in maybe ten seconds. Kriselda talked about potholes on her drive home and litter "all over the place." These weren't kids who were unaware of their surroundings. They were paying attention.
What they didn't do was report any of it. The reasons were different from person to person, but they pointed in a similar direction. Carlie said the issues had been around long enough that they'd become normalized, and that she only really felt the need to report something if it was dramatic or in-your-face. Kriselda actually wanted to report things, but she didn't know who to contact for which kind of issue, and she also mentioned a quieter thing that I've kept thinking about. She said she was sometimes hesitant to report things because she didn't know what the consequences might be of "bringing up issues to people in power." That isn't a UI problem. That's a trust problem, and it's harder to design around.
I went into the interviews assuming the design problem was mostly discoverability. The thinking was something like: show kids the app, the app is fine, they'll use it.
By the third or fourth interview I had to let that go. The students who didn't know about the app still wouldn't use it after we explained what it did. A couple of them said pretty directly that teenagers don't really care about issues in their neighborhood, which I found interesting because the same students had just spent five minutes describing those exact issues to me. So they cared. They just didn't believe reporting would do anything.
That reframed the problem for me. It isn't a discoverability problem, and it isn't even really a usability problem. The app is usable. Carlie told me she thought it was "perfect" the way it was, and that the only issue was that no one had told her about it. The deeper problem is that nothing in the current experience helps a teenager believe their report is going to matter. The submission goes into a void, and even if something does eventually get fixed, the connection between the report and the fix isn't visible enough to build any trust.
A few of the students brought up ideas on their own, without us asking. Gael said it should feel more like TikTok. Daniel wanted a feed. Sol wanted to be able to clearly see what was finished, not just what had been reported. Three different students, three different framings, but I think they were all pointing at the same thing. Make the impact visible.
I asked Kriselda why she didn't report anything, and she gave a couple of answers, but then she said:
"If they're not being reassured, what's the point of reporting anything?"
That line basically reframed the project for me. The problem isn't that the submission form is too hard to find. The problem is that the kid walking past the broken thing every day on the way to school never gets to see it get fixed, and never gets to feel like their report had anything to do with it.
A few things from the interviews ended up shaping the prototypes our team built:
- An upvote system, so a student doesn't feel like they're wasting their time reporting something that has already been reported ten times. It also gives the city a clearer signal about which issues the community keeps surfacing.
- A more visible status timeline, so a submitted report doesn't just disappear after you send it. Sol specifically asked for this. Gael did too, in a different way.
- A community feed, so the app feels less like a government form. This was the TikTok comparison, but we wanted to be careful with it — we didn't want to turn civic engagement into something that feels like a game.
One thing we decided not to do was add a rewards or points system. Sol pointed out that people would just lie for the rewards, and I think he was right. The goal isn't to pay students to care. The goal is to make sure that when they do care, they can see something come of it.
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