Design-thinking informed the visual design and product design of the Connect app for young offenders. The app will help young people communicate with their worker between face-to-face meetings.
Defining the problem
Through our user research, we found the young people did not feel supported between meetings with their worker.
They also needed control and input into planning their pathway to a new identity, so that they could ‘own it’.
Design and build
We researched the apps the young people used and throughout the design process we tested everything with users. This included:
- wireframes
- functionality
- the name of the app
- the look and feel
- colours.
We ran design workshops and produced wireframes that were tested with young people to ensure they were user-friendly.
We created 3 UI interfaces and showed them to the young people. We asked for their preferences and feedback. We iterated the final UI design based on their feedback and preferences.
Our final high-fidelity wireframes were passed onto the developers who created the app. HTML5 was used as the base for the app as opposed to using iOS or Android platforms to allow for better support without fragmentation of O/S versions, licence costs or waiting for app approvals.
Go-live
After the development of the app, developers did some user acceptance testing to ensure the functionality was working as it should and any bugs were fixed before launching the app.
The app was slowly rolled out to children with practitioners gathering feedback of what the children thought about using this in practise.
