Beta – Sprint 5 Show and Share

Here we are at the end of sprint 5. The team has been busy moving our product forward this sprint and gathering further insights from user testing.

Some of our key achievements this sprint have been:

• Added authentication to both Repairs and Housing Management APIs
• Conducted 2nd round of user research
• Analysed user research data and identified key findings
• Created Beta Prototype v4 and change log
• Investigated setting up infrastructure as code within the Azure Cloud
• Completed re-work of built MVP pages
• Housing Management API integrated with Universal Housing

Continued to develop our MVP

We now have the first pages of a working product built and working within an Azure environment and integrated with our housing management system via an API.

It’s worth reminding everyone that what we are developing is designed to be reusable by other local authorities. As such our code will be freely available on GitHub, with plans to build out integration options to more systems.

If you are currently using DRS and Universal Housing systems, we’d love to hear from you and see whether you could be a suitable early adopter of this product.

Housing management integration with authentication

We now have working integration to Lincolns housing management system (Universal Housing) for address searches. Only addresses applicable for our repairs service are returned to prevent repairs being raised for either non-council or leaseholder property’s.

To remove any potential for malicious calls to the service our engineering team have implemented authentication using JSON web tokens. What this means is that the service will only respond from a source it knows and ensures secure communication between the components.

This same technology will also be used for the scheduling API connections.

Second round of user research

Taking a ‘User First’ approach continues to be at the forefront of our development. It was clear from this round of testing that real progress has been made to improve the user experience from our version 1 to this stage. This development is a perfect example that continuous testing with users is essential for any product development, and brings us closer to our ambition of a channel that users prefer to use.

We conducted 6 sessions of testing with users, and to ensure our product is accessible this included users who were short sighted, neuro-diverse and they performed testing using a mobile phone.

The journeys were mapped onto Miro with user’s comments at every stage. It was excellent to see that using this iteration all users successfully navigated the service and were able to book their repair. Most comments were related to the language used and how this needs to be simplified in the MVP service.

Some of these comments included:

“Where is the problem located? Just say where is the problem”

“Am I a leaseholder? It would be good to have an explanation of what the difference is between a tenant and a leaseholder”

Lastly we monitored the use of the ‘Your answers’ drop down. None of the users across both rounds noticed or used the drop down during the journey, so this functionality will be removed from the MVP service as users did not see any value.

The show and share session

Why not take a look at our latest Show and Share, so you can see and listen to the progress made in more detail and see the integration in action: