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Weeknote w/c 18th January 2021

Find out what the My Best Life team have been up to this week from data entry to our young person steering group meetings.

What we did

  • We continued the process of data entry, amending our spreadsheet with more categories to cover a wider range of services.
  • We had a great check-in with Lambeth Council. They connected us to another database (mapping youth organisations in the borough) that might be able to help us. They also said they would talk to three local groups of young people to see if they’d be willing to help us with user testing.
  • We ran a Young Person Steering Group and received great feedback on the look and feel of the app, such as the colours and fonts. They liked blues and purples!

What we’re thinking about

Broadly speaking, there are two groups of young people we need to consider.

  • The first group have gone to others and might have received recommendations. The information isn’t the most helpful, but they know the services they could explore. Ideally they would go to the website of the service and get what they want, so they’re unlikely to want to use our app.
  • The second group may or may not have asked others where to go, but don’t have the information they need, or don’t want to ask anyone they know about what they want. These young people don’t know what is right for them, so they could be more likely to use our app if they come across it.

These two groups are making us think about how the app is introduced, or where the starting point is. It would probably be wrong to assume that young people will find the app themselves—we are interested in the group of young people who don’t know about it yet but will most likely have it suggested to them by a ‘gatekeeper’ (eg, a youth worker) or someone they know. That means trust is important. Knowing what partnerships already exist between organisations will be part of that; if young people already belong to one service and know it’s good, they’ll be more willing to try the other that’s linked to it.

As the Alpha sprint progresses, we’ll need to think about who we want to talk to in usability testing, and whether we need to speak to the gatekeepers if we want to pivot and make the app more of a tool to use with both young people and youth workers. If we were to integrate the role of the gatekeepers into the app, this could mean quite a significant pivot for the Beta sprint. We’ll discuss the pros and cons of all the options.

Challenges

Very few people turned up for the Young Person Steering Group. We want to address that because similar people are turning up each time. How can we capture the views of those who currently aren’t attending? And what causes young people to not turn up? Did something happen in their lives? We might have more luck with attendance in the user testing stage, where young people will be testing the app in a less formal setting.

The data we’ll need for the app is not always readily available on the charity websites. We’re making a note of where the gaps are (and whether there’s any additional information we need to start capturing).

Wins from this week

  • Publishing our first weeknote
  • Positive feedback from young people in our Steering Group, who were really engaged
  • More data promised from Lambeth, which will be helpful for our ongoing data entry
  • Making a video of the prototype so far, showing how the app looks on a phone

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