16 April 2021 2 minute read
What we did
- We planned our approach for the in-market testing work we’ll be doing at the end of Beta 2 (1st June). We’re planning interviews with young people, surveys, site visits and hopefully some bigger events too.
- We spoke with Kerstyn Comley, Co-founder of an app called Mee Too, and discovered and explored opportunities to collaborate in the next phase of work. Mee Too are exploring how to introduce young people to relevant services through the mechanism of peer support. They’ve been piloting in Somerset and are looking to move into new areas soon. Lots of interesting opportunities here.
- We had a helpful call with one of our funders, Comic Relief, exploring how to approach funding for our Bridging Phase. They have recommended we speak with their internal Social Investment team, and colleagues at Spring Impact, who have knowledge and experience of structured accelerators.
- We looked at ways to pool all the insights we’ve gathered from phase 3 into one consolidated learning board—exploring how to categorise insights (eg, product design, user journey, ideas for features and functionality) and how to distinguish between what we think is relevant for current development sprints, and what we may want to take into future scoping.
- We have been redeveloping our learning content online. This is to make sure our learning is as easy to find as possible. (It is coming soon, watch this space!)
- We started synthesising the results from our young person steering group last week. We ran a series of remote card sorting exercises using kardSort. Feedback from user testing had shown that some individuals were surprised by the results shown in certain categories. We were interested in exploring how young people categorise services and opportunities and what wording they would use to describe these categories. We had some really interesting insights that we had been too casual / vague with phrases like ‘Where I’m living’ and more common phrases like ‘Housing’ are preferred.
- We ran multiple user testing sessions with young people—this time exploring the app with young people who have no connections to existing services, youth workers, etc. We are particularly interested in whether it meets their needs and is easy to use for someone who may not have tried to find support before.
What we’re thinking about
We have been exploring how to recruit more user testers who are not involved in services, as this is a harder group for us to engage with. So we recruited the young people by asking our existing user testers if they had any friends who don’t access services and would be willing to chat. We paid both young people for their time—and the additional benefit for the existing user tester was that they got paid for the session, but they got to sit back and let their friend take the lead!
We are also exploring the link between mood and different opportunities available to young people. Within the app, we ask about a young person’s mood and their answers will alter the results displayed. Young people thought this was a new and interesting idea, so we asked them to help organise the services by emotion. Interestingly, the young people said they found that easier than categorising by problem. When looking at the results, however, there is much less consensus about which emotions a service could be linked to. This isn’t a bad thing, but something we will need to explore more.
Challenges
We’re finding it quite tricky to work out the best way to ask charities to review and improve the data we have on their services. Currently, our data is static and sits in a CMS that only our team can access. We are exploring how to export the data, email charities for inputs and re-upload it into the CMS. It is definitely a clunky way to do it, but without having developed an admin portal for this phase, this seems the best way to do it.
Wins from this week
- Gathering lots of insights from young people to help push our development further before launch.
- Planning our approach for the in-market testing work.
