Weekly Notes — Chiltern Music Therapy
Week 4 and 5
We are halfway through this amazing development journey.
When we started, back in February, we had a conceptual prototype to support a multimodal music therapy delivery, 50% in person and 50% digitally.
This prototype was a result of an in-depth retrospective and comparative research study analysis and measuring the benefits and limitations of in-person and remote therapy.
This study demonstrated that although introduced as a temporary response to an emergency situation, digital music therapy could provide added therapeutic value (namely accessibility, consistency and flexibility) and complement in-person services into the future.
The aim of the current development project is to develop the multi-modal approach further; prototyping, exploring and implementing this technological platform and digital adaptations in clinical work.
We have been taking weekly notes to share our journey, which you can find here
The most exciting part of week 4 was the UX research. After working hard on developing the first digital prototype we couldn’t wait to show it to our users, both therapists and beneficiaries.
A thorough analysis of every interview was done afterwards, addressing those elements that we would need to review in the next iteration. From onboarding flow to font size, every element of the platform was evaluated again and again from the perspective of our users, re-mapping some user journeys for better functionality.
We found it very useful to create a Jamboard as we went through the UX review meeting, categorising in themes and actions. You can see ours here to get some ideas for your own UX synthesis exercise.
Another important exercise of week 4 has been an in-depth tech review, researching, evaluating and deciding on the best software and tech tools to use for our platform. The most important criteria were security, user-friendliness and cost, and as you may have guessed, not easy to find tools that can fulfil them all. The team at Yalla Coop did an amazing job in researching our options so we could make informed decisions, and you can find that information here as it may come handy if you are going through the same process!
The top two tasks of week 5 were the challenging development estimation and the Catalyst wrap-up event.
Although we are not wrapping up yet (we started a bit later than the rest of the cohort), it was such an amazing opportunity to hear from all other charities’ journey and the fabulous products they have come up with to find a solution to a very important aspect of their work. It was also exciting to share our project and progress so far.
Finally, the development estimation meeting was all about features prioritisation and making the tough decisions to choose what are the development elements that we are going to focus on over the next sprint, and which ones will need to be left for a further sprint beyond this programme.
We gave a level 1 or 2 to all essential and minimum deliverables. A level 3 to top level bonus features, a level 4 to second level bonus features and finally a level 5+ to the product backlog.
You can see a full list of our estimations here.
Although lots is being done, our to do list is not getting any shorter yet… so off to work!
