Citizens Advice Southampton Weeknotes — 11th February

It seems like barely yesterday that I wrote the last weeknotes — time is flying by. This week the Citizens Advice Southampton (CAS) end of this project has been largely focused on getting the user research up and running. Today I met with our research assistant, along with a volunteer adviser with research experience who has kindly offered to help out, to pull together everything we need to start arranging interviews and surveys. Our RA, Sandy Ciccognani, has learnt the ropes of our CRM in record time and both are all set to go. I left them with a list of client contact details (securely of course), some draft focus group questions to review, and (I hope) plenty of enthusiasm!

In the meantime, Allteks have been working hard on the technical side, and I’ll be including their update each week as well — read on to find out what they’ve been up to.

With regards to the user research, we have:

• Identified around 20 clients who have agreed to take part in research, through a standard question asked by our advisers, and started contacting them to arrange interviews
• Forwarded the adviser survey to CAS advisers, so that those who didn’t complete it in the autumn can have their say; and invited advisers to get in touch to arrange interviews with our researchers
• Forwarded a slightly amended version of the adviser survey to Advice in Southampton partner organisations to be shared with their advisers — as well as expanding the overall number of responses for the quantitative side of this research, we hope the survey will also help us identify where there are differences in training requirements between organisations
• Contacted a wide range of stakeholders and invited them to interviews and focus groups
• Arranged a focus group with our advice supervisors and agreed the discussion topics with our partners at Allteks
• Requested and received a bespoke report from National Citizens Advice that will support us in sending out a short SMS survey to our clients, and scripted the survey
• Reviewed research done by Citizens Advice Rushmoor that’s relevant to this project and sent out a request to the wider Citizens Advice network for any evaluations and impact reports on video advice services elsewhere
• Joined a meeting of the Digital Inclusion Group in the City to explain our work and hear about what others are doing that may be relevant
• Taken a good few deep breaths and tried not to panic at the ambitious research targets we’ve set ourselves with just a couple of weeks to achieve them!

On the technical side, our colleagues at Allteks lead by Rob Edwards have:

• Generated a potential list of technical requirements
• Completed a matrix of options against the potential requirements, assessing the existing options: VOIP, Teams, Zoom and AttendAnywhere, with the addition of Jitsi, Twilio, GoogleMeet and Meetupcall as potential technologies and started investigating and adding to the feature matrix — the latter to be fleshed out from the finalised list of user requirements once available
• Considered the options for scheduling appointments in conjunction with the CAS project team, bearing in mind that an appointment system integral to the Citizens Advice CRM is currently being trialled so external scheduling in AttendAnywhere or Visionable may not be appropriate
• Tested the minimum viable product for the hub with Paul England from CAS
• Tested VOIP, which did not give adequate video quality; now investigating whether this was down to a lighting or camera issue. The test also highlighted that there are no automatic video quality adjustments to cope with bandwidth issues
• Arranged a demo of Meetupcall; ran tests internally with good results; and met with a representative of Meetupcall to discuss options and shortcomings. This option offered better video quality than VOIP, and auto-adapts depending on bandwidth, but may not be suitable for use on clients’ own devices; we’re therefore considering whether a dual/hybrid solution may be appropriate
• Provided feedback for questions for the user research interviews
• Started work on the Data Protection Impact Assessment

Phew! No wonder time is flying. By next week we hope to have at least some results from the user research, although we won’t have had time to analyse them, and have moved forward with the technical development of the solution.