Smart cities use ICT to improve citizens’ quality of life. Therefore, to address the citizens’ needs and meeting the smart city’s quality factors, defining appropriate goals and objectives is paramount. However, a considerable count of services does not have a goal to respond to the smart cities’ demands. Defining stakeholders’ needs, setting consequent objectives and specifying other technical requirements happen during the design phase of the services. Therefore, there is a need to provide a view of the required smart considerations. This paper aims at introducing a taxonomy for the required elements needed to be taken into account during the design of smart services. The proposed taxonomy is evaluated using a real case study in a European smart city council. The outcome of this research contributes to defining an architecture for designing more effective services in terms of enabling responses to citizens’ concerns and meeting the smart city quality requirements.