Publish, learn, improve

This week we’ve designed and prototyped a tool to make our website more useful during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. We want to enable decision-makers to make informed choices about if, when and how to use EdTech during this crisis. We’re building something to help you find education responses by governments and EdTech tools that support these responses.

Given the urgency of the current situation, we think it’s more important to provide something simple that you can use now rather than spending longer to build something more complicated. So we’ve adopted an agile, iterative approach to development.

We quickly moved from talking about ideas to drawing sketches. This allowed us to check we were imagining the same things, and helped us work out the quickest release that would be helpful.

After critiquing these sketches, we built a simple HTML prototype. Again, this helped us to achieve a shared understanding of how the tool would work, and identify the quickest way to build a releasable version.

This agile, iterative approach means we can get something built fast, but we’re going to need your help to make sure it’s useful. Publishing something quickly means we can ask you for feedback on what it’s actually like to use, and use this feedback to improve it in the next iteration, and to design better, more useful tools and services.

We’re still keen to speak to people about what is useful to you, and how you use the information and services we provide. If you can spare some time to talk to us – usually as part of a 1 hour interview with our user researcher – please get in touch. We need your name, job title or role, name of the organisation you work for, country and, ideally, an idea of dates and times you might be available.

We look forward to releasing the tool and getting your feedback.

Update: we’ve now released the tool! Check it out here.