CivTech Week #1: User testing and postcodes

Putting the pedal to the metal

This week, we started at the CivTech accelerator. The challenge we are working on is:

How can we create the most local and best possible user experience for people engaging with the Citizens Advice Scotland network?

We had proposed a voice AI approach and have mocked up a lightweight prototype. Now we are at the Accelerator phase, can we turn this dream into reality?

The two main issues we’ve worked on this first week:

1. User testing

Is voice recognition good enough, especially on postcodes (which can be tricky for voice AI) and on Scottish accents (ditto). We’ve been playing around with two possible systems, and so far the results are pretty promising.

We’re confident that our system will help Scottish citizens and not end up like the ‘voice recognition AI lift’ scenario from the Scottish comedy show Burnistoun (credit to Graeme at CivTech for making us aware of this potential pitfall!)

2. Postcodes

There’s hidden complexity about the mapping between postcodes to local offices. For instance:

• The caller needs to be connected to a bureaux within his local authority. That means the nearest bureaux might not be the right one to direct the caller to.
• Even within local authority boundaries, there’s not always agreement about where the boundary is between different bureaux.
• Some bureaus don’t provide advice about some topics. In that case, the caller would need to be routed to a different bureaux.

Next week we’ll be ​​analysing the results from our user testing, evaluating which system has performed the best and trying to map Scottish postcodes to local bureaux.

Wish us luck!