19 April 2021 2 minute read
What we did
- We ran an event with Integrate, a communities and voluntary services organisation in Lambeth that has done a lot of work with Lambeth Council and has helped us get connected to their members. We talked to charities about the app and how it could help them.
- After the Integrate event, we had an internal scoping session to go over what came out of the event and what it means for us, so we know what we need to prioritise.
- We’ve been reflecting on our recent user testing with young people from our Steering Group and their friends who are new to the app. Some seemed quite surprised that someone would actually bother to make an app for them!
- We have been scoping out the final round for development before we launch our proof of concept in June.
What we’re thinking about
The young people in our Steering Group had different attitudes to how they would contact the organisations recommended in the app. Most were reluctant to make a phone call as the first point of contact, but some young people would call eventually (not liking it, but doing it anyway), whereas others would just email continuously.
We did most of the upfront development of our app in the last two sprints, so now we need to make sure we’ve got the key features in the app. The app itself is getting quite filled up with stuff, so we might need to slim it down in terms of content, rather than add any more fundamental big features. In particular, we’re thinking of reviewing the services and the categories they’ve been given—if the link is a bit tenuous, we can remove those categories from the service and assign more fitting ones. That should hopefully make young people happier with the results they get from the filter and the quiz.
Challenges
We’ve been researching how similar apps include safeguarding and urgent help options. We know we need to include this in our app, and we want to make sure we’re doing it right (i.e. not dumping the ‘I Need Urgent Help’ button where someone in crisis wouldn’t be able to find it). At the moment, if you’re doing the quiz and say that you’re feeling ‘Unsafe’, ‘Scared’ and/or ‘Unhappy’, the next question asks if you need help and offers some helplines. You can either act on it, or say you’re actually all right and carry on with the quiz. But having the urgent help hidden in a quiz is perhaps not the most helpful; if you do need urgent help, you wouldn’t go and click on a quiz.
We’re starting to get the ball rolling on contacting charities—using the Integrate event to get emails out and invite people to update their data on the app. We’ll export the data we have in the app and copy it into emails for charities. It’s a bit clunky, but it’s the best way of getting a response, and it gives us autonomy over what we include. If the app was working at a larger scale, we would need more moderation.
Wins from this week
- We have confirmed our launch date – 1st June!
- Speaking to over 30 organisations in Lambeth to understand their thoughts about the app and how it could add value to their work.
