Early insights from users

Through Monday’s toil to Friday’s gleaming, here’s the sixth weeknote from the team.

What we’ve heard from users so far

You’ll remember from last week that we started the first benchmarking session, and early this week it finished.

In this first round of user research, we tested an interactive prototype of Extract with five users across four LPAs. This ‘MVP Test’ allowed us to observe real users interacting with the tool in their actual context of use.

Early analysis indicates that the core concept is well understood and shows strong potential to deliver effective, highly valued solutions.

One promising insight is that users are already thinking about what the prototype might enable after an extraction has been reviewed. Even when an extraction was less successful, users were interested in being able to easily transfer and reuse parts of the data within their own systems and tools.

As one participant explained:

This would definitely speed up the process, but the question is: how transferable is the data is to back-office systems?

Seamless integration and reuse of extracted data within users’ existing systems in an important part of the proposition, so we’ll need to dedicate some research to help us achieve it.

Insights from this study are helping us:

• deepen our understanding of the problem space
• evaluate the technology from a user perspective, and
• inform user-centred design and engineering decisions.

As we iterate the prototypes, they will continue to serve as research tools to probe broader, less-defined factors that influence implementation, governance, and trust, ensuring the solution aligns with users’ expectations and integrates seamlessly within their wider ecosystems.

Early next week we’ll firm up the plan for the second round of research.

Merging ideas

Fabia, Hannah, Kev and Aydin spent time interrogating and critiquing multiple user flows, looking at the many options we have for features and the whole user journey. This was to help with merging the diverse ideas from both teams into one cohesive flow.

The designers and frontend developers also spoke about the constraints that shape what we design and build. For example, there is not always a one-to-one relationship between an area and the planning documents that describe it. A user may need to upload multiple files (a map, a design statement, a legal document) to extract all the information about one place. How might we help users combine documents or combine extractions for one entity?

The conversation also moved on to how we’ll merge multiple strands of work in the codebase. Working from one consistent codebase, using and iterating the shared components, will help us move faster – essential for rapid prototyping, and helpful for the future too.

Lunch together

One highlight of working together in Marsham Street on Wednesdays is lunchtime. For one hour, we step away from the work and get a chance to chat, to catch up – and, most importantly, devour a plate of pie, chips and gravy!

Making these social bonds isn’t just fun, it also helps the work work. So that we don’t only have a shared commitment to the goal but also to each other.

After lunch, Gordon kindly shared a gift he’d bought for each member of the team – an Extract mission patch!

Planning for version 0.2

Off the back of the research sessions, we started planning version 0.2 – what would be in it, and how it would work. Before we make a start on it though, we need to consolidate the codebase and plan who’s working on what. That’ll happen early next week.

We’re going to trial something new, pairing a developer with a designer so they can work in unison. The goal is to eliminate the hand-off between design and development, instead figuring out the constraints and possible options together. We want to encourage creativity too, and coming up with lots of options. As Linus Pauling said:

If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas. Most of them will be wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away.

Get the obvious ideas out of the way and together we’ll come up with the good ones.

Continued experimentation with the latest AI models

Gavin, Jordy and Rich have carried on experimenting with the latest versions of Gemini and Segment Anything. The new technology is performing well on the hardest maps we’ve tested.