Notes from the ground: s9y + a11y
An in-the-weeds update from our latest sprint
It’s February 16th, which means we’re now 7 working-weeks into 2021. Time is really flying, and we’re having fun.
We haven’t done an in-the-weeds, working-level update in a while. In the interest of working in the open, and making time to reflect on recent progress — and challenges — here’s a peek into the last two weeks.
Our last sprint was named “s9y + a11y” — which stands for scalability (s9y) and accessibility (a11y). Our current development is focused on addressing accessibility issues. Our current design cycles are dedicated to thinking about MOVE’s future: how do we set up MOVE’s interface to scale with more data, and more kinds of data?
Rose 🌹
Highlights of this sprint include:
- Maddy (that’s me, MOVE product manager!) published Introducing MOVE: a centralized platform for traffic volume and collision data
- Evan, MOVE’s resident software developer, gave the rest of the team a database tour
- We recently adopted a practice of weekly design critiques; Shine has been furiously iterating on designs for adding global filters, additional collision filters, and an accessible list view of geospatial data
- We decided on a first set of traffic volume data to publish on the City of Toronto’s Open Data portal!
Bud 🌱
What we’re looking forward to:
- We plan to publish traffic volume data to the Open Data portal in the next two weeks!
- We’re lining up user/usability testing sessions so we can get feedback on our next release candidate
- MOVE version 1.0 includes support for a handful of the studies used across the Transportation Services division. Through our research and talking with users, we’ve learned there are many more types of studies used across the division. Eventually, our goal is to support these in MOVE as well — from requesting new studies, to loading the data, to retrieval, and aggregating that data into new views. For now, we’re starting with research. We’re excited to start diggin’ in.
- On the design front, we’ve been pushing against the limits of what MOVE’s current design will support as we add new features and data. Shine is taking a step back to consider how MOVE will need to scale as we incorporate more multi-modal data (pedestrians, cyclists, scooters, e-bikes, etc. — i.e. more than just motor vehicles). Shine is taking an “a carte blanche” approach: knowing what we know now, what would MOVE look like if we rebuilt from scratch, today? We’re not planning on a whole redesign, but a fresh look might give us a better perspective on how we can adapt MOVE’s current design.
Thorn 📌
Challenges we’re facing:
- We recently went through a full accessibility assessment, and received a list of non-compliance issues. We’re a small team of three, and we are trying to find a balance between addressing these issues, and continuing to develop new features and respond to user feedback iteratively, and quickly. If you have ideas about how to do this effectively on agile teams, especially in government, please reach out!
- We’re still addressing feedback and bugs from our launch of MOVE 1.0, and we haven’t been able to make space to focus on our next Big Things— addressing the scalability of MOVE, and building new data pipelines.
Closing thoughts
In the past two months, we launched MOVE, released a minor version with bugfixes and email notifications, hosted four training sessions for staff, and we’ve sunk our teeth into accessibility and scalability.
In the next few weeks, we’re publishing some traffic volume data to the Open Data portal. Now that divisional staff have been using MOVE for two months, we’ve received a ton of great feedback — and bug reports. We’re teeing up our second minor release post-launch, in which we will address some of that feedback and make improvements.
We have wins under our belt, exciting work in flight, and big challenges ahead. More than anything, though, I’m excited that we get to continue testing with our users so we can know whether we’re moving in the right direction.
