Weeknote w/c 26th July 2021

By Rose Anderson 30 July 2021 3 minute read

What we did

  • We’ve been taking some time to plan how we take stock of all the work we’ve done to date. As part of this, we’re moving all our notes from our user testing sessions into one place, ready for us to review with the analysis framework.

What we’re thinking about

In the next few weeks, we’re hoping to get started with the analysis of the user testing interviews we’ve done so far. This will involve setting up a spreadsheet for the analysis framework and inputting the findings from our interviews into it. To ensure we have enough respondents for the analysis to be worthwhile, we hope to arrange some more interviews with young people, especially those living in Lambeth, in the coming weeks. A blog post about how you can get involved will follow shortly.

We’re also exploring key areas of work that will ensure the sustainability of our app, especially if we scale. Last Friday, we spoke to a collection of organisations (Open Referral UK, Parent Zone, Nominet and Neontribe) about how we can make it easier for people to find support and opportunities online. We discussed existing work by Open Referral UK to bring together existing datasets and make them more readily available. From our experience, we know a lot of these data sets are not available, and/or have low-quality data. Alongside this, we want to reduce duplication of efforts to create such directories, so we need to tackle it from both sides—improving the availability of the data AND improving the quality of the data.

We are now exploring a side project which aims to increase the efficiency, effectiveness and reach of smaller organisations by improving the availability of good-quality data about services and opportunities in local areas, so that people are better able to find the support and opportunities that are right for their needs and interests. To get there, we are exploring using Metadata embedded in the header of website pages, Facebook pages/groups and apps to create a scheme. If services included the same scheme in their sites, it could be ‘scraped’ from many services automatically and organised into the open data standard to create new datasets. We are keen to hear from others working in this space. If you are interested in finding out more, or already doing something in this space, please comment below or email kathryn.dingle@thinknpc.org

Challenges

Arranging more user testing interviews could be a challenge at this stage—we’re now in the school holidays, so young people might not be available if they are travelling for a break (or already engaging in holiday activities!).

Wins from this week

  • The app is still receiving a good rate of visitors!

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